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

Though they did not know it at the time—the idea would have seemed preposterous—the sounding of “boots and saddle” that morning marked the beginning of the end of the Indian wars in America, of fully two hundred fifty years of bloody combat that had begun almost with the first landing of the first ship on the first fatal shore in Virginia. The final destruction of the last of the hostile tribes would not take place for a few more years. Time would be yet required to round them all up, or starve them out, or exterminate their sources of food, or run them to ground in shallow canyons, or kill them outright. For the moment the question was one of hard, unalloyed will. There had been brief spasms of official vengeance and retribution before: J. M. Chivington’s and George Armstrong Custer’s savage massacres of Cheyennes in 1864 and 1868 were examples. But in those days there was no real attempt to destroy the tribes on a larger scale, no stomach for it. That had changed, and on October 3, the change assumed the form of an order, barked out through the lines of command to the men of the Fourth Cavalry and Eleventh Infantry, to go forth and kill Comanches. It was the end of anything like tolerance, the beginning of the final solution.

Sherman’s chosen agent of destruction was a civil war hero named Ranald Slidell Mackenzie, a difficult, moody, and implacable young man who had graduated first in his class from West Point in 1862 and had finished the Civil War, remarkably, as a brevet brigadier general. Because his hand was gruesomely disfigured from war wounds, the Indians called him No-Finger Chief, or Bad Hand. A complex destiny awaited him. Within four years he would prove himself the most brutally effective Indian fighter in American history.

The Indians, mostly Kiowas, passed them over because of a shaman’s superstitions and had instead attacked a nearby wagon train. What happened was typical of the savage, revenge-driven attacks by Comanches and Kiowas in Texas in the postwar years. What was not typical was Sherman’s proximity and his own very personal and mortal sense that he might have been a victim, too. Because of that the raid became famous, known to history as the Salt Creek Massacre.5 Seven men were killed in the raid, though that does not begin to describe the horror of what Mackenzie found at the scene. According to Captain Robert G. Carter, Mackenzie’s subordinate, who witnessed its aftermath, the victims were stripped, scalped, and mutilated. Some had been beheaded and others had their brains scooped out. “Their fingers, toes and private parts had been cut off and stuck in their mouths,” wrote Carter, “and their bodies, now lying in several inches of water and swollen or bloated beyond all chance of recognition, were filled full of arrows, which made them resemble porcupines.” They had clearly been tortured, too. “Upon each exposed abdomen had been placed a mass of live coals. . . . One wretched man, Samuel Elliott, who, fighting hard to the last, had evidently been wounded, was found chained between two wagon wheels and, a fire having been made from the wagon pole, he had been slowly roasted to death—‘burnt to a crisp.’ ”

Mackenzie and his men did not know much about Quanah. No one did. Though there is an intimacy of information on the frontier—opposing sides often had a surprisingly detailed understanding of one another, in spite of the enormous physical distances between them and the fact that they were trying to kill one another—Quanah was simply too young for anyone to know much about him yet, where he had been, or what he had done. Though no one would be able to even estimate the date of his birth until many years later, it was mostly likely in 1848, making him twenty-three that year and eight years younger than Mackenzie, who was also so young that few people in Texas, Indian or white, knew much about him at the time. Both men achieved their fame only in the final, brutal Indian wars of the mid-1870s. Quanah was exceptionally young to be a chief. He was reputed to be ruthless, clever, and fearless in battle.

By the time Mackenzie was hunting him in 1871, Quanah’s mother had long been famous. She was the best known of all Indian captives of the era, discussed in drawing rooms in New York and London as “the white squaw” because she had refused on repeated occasions to return to her people, thus challenging one of the most fundamental of the Eurocentric assumptions about Indian ways: that given the choice between the sophisticated, industrialized, Christian culture of Europe and the savage, bloody, and morally backward ways of the Indians, no sane person would ever choose the latter. Few, other than Quanah’s mother, did. Her name was Cynthia Ann Parker. She was the daughter of one of early Texas’s most prominent families, one that included Texas Ranger captains, politicians, and prominent Baptists who founded the state’s first Protestant church.

When it was all over, the soldiers discovered that Quanah and his warriors had made off with seventy of their best horses and mules, including Colonel Mackenzie’s magnificent gray pacer. In west Texas in 1871, stealing someone’s horse was often equivalent to a death sentence. It was an old Indian tactic, especially on the high plains, to simply steal white men’s horses and leave them to die of thirst or starvation. Comanches had used it to lethal effect against the Spanish in the early eighteenth century. In any case, an unmounted army regular stood little chance against a mounted Comanche.

That year General Antonio López de Santa Anna made an epic blunder that changed the destiny of Texas, and thus of the North American continent. On March 6, while flying the blood-red flag of “no quarter given,” some two thousand of his Mexican troops destroyed several hundred Texans at a small mission known as the Alamo in the town of San Antonio de Bexar. At the time it seemed like a great victory. It was a catastrophic mistake. He compounded it three weeks later at the nearby town of Goliad when he ordered his army to execute some three hundred fifty Texan soldiers after they had surrendered. The prisoners were marched out in columns, shot down, and their bodies burned. Wounded men were dragged into the streets of the presidio to be shot. These acts created martyrs and spawned legends. The murderous ferocity of the Alamo fighters was mere prelude to what happened next. On April 21, at the Battle of San Jacinto, a force of Texans under the command of General Sam Houston outmaneuvered Santa Anna’s army, cornered it against a muddy bayou, and, with extreme bias, destroyed it. The victory marked the end of Mexican rule north of the Rio Grande, and the birth of a sovereign nation called the Republic of Texas.

What happened next is one of the most famous events in the history of the American frontier, in part because it came to be regarded by historians as the start of the longest and most brutal of all the wars between Americans and a single Indian tribe.14 Most of the wars against Native Americans in the East, South, and Midwest had lasted only a few years. Hostile tribes made trouble for a while but were soon tracked to their villages where their lodgings and crops were burned, the inhabitants exterminated or forced to surrender. Lengthy “wars” against the Shawnees, for example, were really just a series of Indian defeats strung out over many years (and complicated by British-French alliances). Wars against the northern Plains Indians such as the Sioux started much later, and did not last nearly as long. When Benjamin Parker reached the assembled Indians, alone, on foot and unarmed, they told him they wanted a cow to slaughter and also directions to a water hole. He told them they could not have the cow, but offered other food. He returned to the fort through the open gate, told his thirty-two-year-old brother, Silas, what the Indians had said, remarked on the absurdity of their request for directions to water when their horses were still dripping wet, then gathered up a few staples and bravely went back out, even though Silas warned him not to.

She described what happened to some of the looters: Among [my father’s medicines] was a bottle of pulverized arsenic, which the Indians mistook for a kind of white paint, with which they painted their faces and bodies all over, dissolving it in their saliva. The bottle was brought to me to tell them what it was. I told them I did not know though I knew because the bottle was labeled.21 Four of the Indians painted their faces with the arsenic. According to Rachel, all of them died, presumably in horrible agony.

The preceding description may seem needlessly bloody in its details. But it typified Comanche raids in an era that was defined by such attacks. This was the actual, and often quite grim, reality of the frontier. There is no dressing it up, though most accounts of Indian “depredations” (the newspapers’ favorite euphemism) at the time often refused even to acknowledge that the women had been victims of abuse. But everyone knew. What happened to the Parkers was what any settler on the frontier would have learned to expect, and to fear. In its particulars the raid was exactly what the Spanish and their successors, the Mexicans, had endured in south Texas, New Mexico, and northern Mexico since the late 1600s, and what the Apaches, Osages, Tonkawas, and other tribes had been subjected to for several centuries. Most of the early raids in Texas were driven by a desire for horses or whatever loot could be taken. Later, especially in the last days of the Indian wars, vengeance would become the principal motivation. (The Salt Creek Massacre in 1871 was an example.) The savagery of those raids would make the violence at Parker’s Fort seem tame and unimaginative by comparison.

As late as 1786, the Spanish governor of New Mexico still believed that the Comanche stronghold was in Colorado, when in fact they had established supremacy as far south as the San Saba country of Texas, some five hundred miles away.3 This is partly because the European mind simply could not comprehend the distances the average Comanche could travel. The nomadic range of their bands was around eight hundred miles. Their striking range—this confused the insurgent populations as much as anything—was four hundred miles.4 That meant that a Spanish settler or soldier in San Antonio was in grave and immediate danger from a Comanche brave sitting before a fire in the equivalent of modern-day Oklahoma City. It took years before anyone understood that the same tribe that was raiding on the plains of Durango, Mexico, was also riding above the Arkansas River in modern-day Kansas. But by 1836, of course, the Spanish were long gone, replaced by Mexicans who had even less success dealing with Comanches, who contemptuously referred to them as their “stock-keepers.”5 It is one of history’s great ironies that one of the main reasons Mexico had encouraged Americans to settle in Texas in the 1820s and 1830s was because they wanted a buffer against Comanches, a sort of insurance policy on their borderlands.

Those are the words of twenty-year-old Rachel Parker Plummer, written probably sometime in early 1839. She was referring to her memoir of captivity, and predicting her own death. She was right. She died on March 19 of that year. She had been dragged, sometimes quite literally, over half of the Great Plains as the abject slave of Comanche Indians, and then had logged another two thousand miles in what amounted to one of the most grueling escapes ever made from any tribe by any captive. To the readers of her era, the memoir was jaw-dropping. It still is. As a record of pure, blood-tinged, white-knuckled adventure on America’s nineteenth-century frontier, there are few documents that can compare to it.

This sort of cruelty is a problem in any narrative about American Indians, because Americans like to think of their native aboriginals as in some ways heroic or noble. Indians were, in fact, heroic and noble in many ways, especially in defense of their families. Yet in the moral universe of the West—in spite of our own rich tradition of torture, which includes officially sanctioned torments in Counter-Reformation Europe and sovereign regimes such as that of Peter the Great in Russia—a person who tortures or rapes another person or who steals another person’s child and then sells him cannot possibly be seen that way. Crazy Horse was undoubtedly heroic in battle and remarkably charitable in life. But as an Oglala Sioux he was also a raider, and raiding meant certain very specific things, including the abuse of captives. His great popularity—a giant stone image of him is being carved from a mountain in South Dakota—may have a great deal to do with the fact that very little is known about his early life.15 He is free to be the hero we want him to be.

Thus some chroniclers ignore the brutal side of Indian life altogether; others, particularly historians who suggest that before white men arrived Indian-to-Indian warfare was a relatively bloodless affair involving a minimum of bloodshed, deny it altogether.16 But certain facts are inescapable: American Indians were warlike by nature, and they were warlike for centuries before Columbus stumbled upon them. They fought over hunting grounds, to be sure, but they also made a good deal of brutal and bloody war that was completely unnecessary. The Comanches’ relentless and never-ending pursuit of the hapless Tonkawas was a good example of this, as was their harassment of Apaches long after they had been driven from the buffalo grounds.

Most important, the Indians themselves saw absolutely nothing wrong with these acts. For westering settlers, the great majority of whom believed in the idea of absolute good and evil, and thus of universal standards of moral behavior, this was nearly impossible to understand. Part of it had to do with the Comanches’ theory of the nature of the universe, which was vastly different from that of the civilized West. Comanches had no dominant, unified religion, or anything like a single God. Though in interviews after their defeat they often seemed to go along with the idea of a “Great Spirit,” Comanche ethnographers Ernest Wallace and E. Adamson Hoebel were extremely skeptical of any creation myths that involved a single spirit or an “evil one.”19 “We never gave much consideration to creation,” said an old Comanche named Post Oak Jim in an interview in the 1930s. “We just knew we were here. Our thoughts were mostly directed toward understanding the spirits.”

Comanches all spoke the same language, dressed roughly in the same way, shared the same religious beliefs and customs, and led a common style of life that distinguished them from other tribes and from the rest of the world. That life, however, according to ethnographers Wallace and Hoebel, “did not include political institutions or social mechanisms by which they could act as a tribal unit.”31 There was no big chief, no governing council, no Comanche “nation” that you could locate in a particular place, negotiate with, or conquer in battle. To whites, of course, this made no sense at all. It resembled no governing system they recognized. Across the plains, they insisted on making treaties with band headmen—often very colorful, strong-willed, and powerful ones—assuming incorrectly that the headmen spoke for the entire tribe. They would make this mistake again and again.

Historians generally agree that there were five major bands at the turn of the nineteenth century. Most of the discussion in this book will focus on them. Each contained more than a thousand people. Some perhaps had as many as five thousand. (At its zenith, the entire nation was estimated at twenty thousand.) They were: the Yamparika (Yap Eaters), the northernmost band, who inhabited the lands to the south of the Arkansas River; the Kotsoteka (Buffalo Eaters), whose main grounds were the Canadian River valley in present-day Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle; the Penateka (Honey Eaters), the largest and southernmost band, whose territory stretched deep into Texas; the Nokoni (Wanderers), “middle” Comanches, who occupied the lands in north Texas and present-day Oklahoma between the Penateka and the northern bands; finally, the Quahadis (Antelopes), Quanah’s band, which haunted the headstreams of the Colorado, Brazos, and Red rivers in far northwest Texas. Each band played a different part in history.

All cooperated with one another on the friendliest of terms. All had, almost invariably, the same interests at heart. They hunted and raided together on an informal, ad hoc basis, and frequently swapped members. They never fought one another.33 They always had common interests, common enemies, and in spite of their decentralization acted with remarkable consistency when it came to diplomacy and trade. (Other tribes had band structures that were even harder for whites to understand. Sitting Bull, for example, was a member of the Sioux tribe, but his affiliation was with the Lakota, or western division, also known as Teton, and his specific band was Hunkpapa.)

Then something remarkable happened. Starting around 1706, the Spanish authorities in Santa Fe began to notice a striking change in the behavior of their hated adversaries.2 They were, it seemed, disappearing, or at least moving off, generally to the south and west. Raiding had virtually stopped. It was as though a treaty of peace had been signed, but nothing of the sort had happened. The Spanish civil and military establishments began to realize that some sort of catastrophe had befallen the Apaches, though the extent of it would not be clear for years to come. In 1719 a military expedition to the northeast of Santa Fe had found several populous and formerly dangerous bands of the Apaches—the Jicarillas, Carlanes, and Cuartelejo—in what appeared to be full retreat from their old grounds.3 What was happening? The Spanish were not entirely unaware of geopolitical realities. They understood that the Comanches and Apaches were at war. But they had difficulty enough telling one Indian from another, let alone figuring out the status of a war between tribes that fought unseen battles with unknown outcomes over hundreds of square miles of land. All they were sure of was that their enemies were vanishing. What they were sensing from afar, however, amounted to the wholesale destruction of the Apache nation.

Almost all of this violence is lost to history. It generally took the form of raids on the villages of the Athapaskans, whose fondness for agriculture—ironically a higher form of civilization than the Comanches ever attained—doomed them. Crops meant fixed locations and semipermanent villages, which meant that the Apache bands could be hunted down and slaughtered. The fully nomadic Comanches had no such weakness. The details of these raids must have been horrific. The Apaches, who fought on foot, became easy marks for the mounted, thundering Comanches in their breechclouts and black war paint.

The Apaches were not their only victims. As the Comanches streamed south across the Arkansas River, flush with their astonishing mastery of the horse and their rapidly evolving understanding of mounted warfare, they discovered something else about themselves: Their war parties could navigate enormous distances using only natural landmarks. They could also do it at night. They were better at this, too, than anyone else. Before leaving, a war party would assemble and receive navigational instruction from elders, which included drawing maps in the sand showing hills, valleys, water holes, rivers. Each day of the journey was planned, and the novices would commit this to memory. Dodge reported that one such group of raiders, none older than nineteen, and none of whom had ever been to Mexico, was able to travel from Brady’s Creek, Texas, near modern San Angelo, to Monterrey, Mexico—three hundred fifty–plus miles—without making a wrong turn and with nothing more than the instructions they had received.

But in an era of grave misjudgments the greatest miscalculation of all took place in the year 1758. It happened on a lovely bend of a limestone river, amid fields of wildflowers in the hill country of Texas, about one hundred twenty miles northwest of San Antonio, and resulted in a grisly, era-defining event that became known as the San Saba Massacre. The massacre, in turn, would draw Spain into its greatest military defeat in the New World. Both came at the hands of the Comanches. There were many reasons for what took place, and many Spanish officials played a part. But the man to whom history assigns responsibility was an officer named Don Diego Ortiz de Parrilla. That he was ill-fated, unlucky, and undeserving of much of the blame for what happened did not make it any easier for him. Parrilla’s story offers one of history’s clearest windows into what it was like in embattled, Comanche-tormented New Spain in the middle of the eighteenth century.

The San Saba Mission proposal was indeed, as Parrilla had suspected, a sham. The Lipans and other bands never had any intention of converting to Christianity. But what neither Parrilla nor any Spanish official had understood was the reason for the deception, and thus they had no idea of the extent of the treachery that had been perpetrated upon them. What had in fact happened, while the padres were busy shining up their sacramental vessels, was that the Comanche empire—an area far, far larger than any Spaniard suspected in those years—had arrived precisely on their doorstep.29 The Spanish had been cleverly lured well beyond the actual boundaries of the Apache lands. The San Saba country was not their homeland at all: It was Comancheria proper, and a Spanish fort there amounted to a declaration of war on the Comanches. This was exactly what the Apaches wanted: They wanted their dire enemy destroyed. Or at least stopped in its relentless southward sweep.

Parrilla now rode to the mission, where three priests and a handful of Indians and servants were protected by five soldiers, to beg Father Terreros to leave for the far greater security of the fort. Terreros refused, insisting that the Indians would never harm him. He was wrong. On the morning of March 16, 1758, mass was interrupted by the noise of whooping Indians. When the padres ran to the parapets, they saw a jaw-dropping sight: On all sides of the mission were gathered some two thousand warriors, many painted black and crimson, Plains Indians in the full regalia of war. They were mostly Comanches. As with many Comanche raids, there were also outriders, in this case Wichitas, with whom the Comanches had recently made peace. (In later years, the outriders tended to be Kiowas; in both cases they usually rode under Comanche leadership.) They were armed with bows, lances, and muskets. For a short time, they pretended to be friendly, insisting they had come to offer their allegiance to the Spaniards; the tall, stolid Comanche chief even accepted gifts, though he did so disdainfully, as though the givers were not worth his consideration. Then the looting and killing started. The first to die was Father Terreros, shot with a musket. He was followed by a soldier who was guarding him. Others were shot or hacked to death. The Indians set fire to the buildings of the mission. The dead priests were stripped, their bodies mutilated. One of them, Padre Santiesteban, was decapitated....

Considering what had happened in New Mexico and what was even now happening in Texas, he had what sounded like a wildly implausible goal: He wanted to make friends and allies of them. This he did. He gathered Comanche chiefs for peace talks, insisting that he speak with all of the bands that touched the western perimeter of the plains, and eventually insisting on appointing a single chief to speak for all the bands, something that had never happened before. Anza treated the Comanches as equals, did not threaten their hunting grounds, and refused to try to declare sovereignty over them. He offered them trade. They liked and respected him. In one of the more remarkable diplomatic pirouettes ever seen on the border, Anza then managed to concoct an overweening solution to all his problems. He somehow managed not only to get the Comanches to sign a peace treaty, but also to bind them with their enemies the Utes in an alliance with Spain against their bitterest foes, the Apaches. Then, for the coup de grâce, he took this combined force of Spanish, Ute, and Comanche and used it to force the Navajo into the compact. Odder still, Anza’s treaty worked. In the entire history of the American West, few treaties between whites and Indians have ever held up more than a few years. Most were invalid the day they were signed. History is full of hundreds of Indian treaties concocted by governments who could not enforce them. This is the rare exception. It was only with the province of New Me...

And fight them they did. The upshot of the Lamar presidency was an almost immediate war against all Indians in Texas. The summer of 1839 witnessed one of the most savage campaigns ever unleashed against Native Americans. The first target was the Cherokees, who had been pushed relentlessly westward over many decades from their homelands in the Carolinas. Many had landed in the piney woods and sandy riverbanks of east Texas, near the Louisiana border, where they had largely lived in peace with whites for almost twenty years. They were one of the five “civilized tribes,” and were indeed quickly absorbing the white man’s culture, dressing like whites, farming or running businesses, speaking English. The excuse for getting rid of them was a trumped-up charge that they were part of a Mexican-backed plot to drive the whites from Texas. It was almost certainly false, but it was all that Lamar and his secretary of war needed. Faced with the demand for his immediate departure from the state, Chief Bowles of the Cherokees agreed to leave if the government compensated his tribe for improvements they had made on the land. The Texans agreed in principle, but offered little, and talks soon broke down. Then, by plan, the soldiers moved in. Nine hundred of them. On July 15, 1839, they attacked a Cherokee village.11 On July 16 they cornered five hundred Cherokees in a dense thicket and swamp and proceeded to kill most of the men, including Chief Bowles. Two days later, the soldiers burned t...

Colonel William Fisher, one of the Texas commissioners, replied sharply: “I do not like your answer. I told you not to come here again without bringing in your prisoners. You have come against my orders. Your women and children may depart in peace. . . . When those prisoners are returned, your chiefs here present may likewise go free. Until then we hold you as hostages.”32 As he spoke, a detachment of soldiers marched into the courthouse and took up positions in the front and back. When the astonished Comanches finally figured out, through the terrified translator, what had been said, they panicked and rushed for the doors. The soldiers closed ranks. Spirit Talker, who got to the door first, drew his knife and stabbed a soldier. Then the soldiers opened fire, dropping Spirit Talker and other Indians as well as several of their own people. They fired again. The room was filled with noise and smoke and blood and ricocheting rifle balls. One soldier, Matthew “Old Paint” Caldwell, took a stray bullet in the leg. Hobbled, he grabbed a musket from one of the chiefs, blew his head off, then used it to bludgeon another Indian to death. The fight spilled outside, and now a full-scale, Hollywood-style melee erupted in the plaza. The Indians who had waited outside—men, women, and children—turned on the onlookers, many of whom were armed, and the fighting spread. People who saw it said the Indian women and boys fought as hard as the men.33 One Indian boy shot a district judge through ...

The next day a woman who had not been wounded was given a horse and rations and told to ride to her people with the news of what happened. She was also to deliver an ultimatum: The survivors would be put to death unless the Comanche bands released the fifteen captives that Matilda Lockhart had told them about. If the woman did not return in twelve days, during which time there would be a full truce, “these prisoners shall be killed, for we will know that you have killed our captive friends and relatives.”37 If the Texans felt good about their bargaining position, they would soon learn otherwise. Under normal circumstances, we would never have found out how this news was received in the Comanche villages. But in this case a young captive named Booker Webster, who was later released, left a harrowing account. When the woman arrived with her news, the Comanches reacted with a mixture of horror, despair, and cold fury. More or less in that order. The women screamed and wailed in mourning. They slashed their arms, and faces, and breasts, and lopped off fingers. Some even injured themselves fatally. The men moaned and rocked back and forth and some chopped off their hair. So large was the horse herd belonging to the dead chiefs that it took two days to kill and burn them all (a Comanche custom). Then, through the smoke of burning horseflesh, they unleashed their feelings of depthless grief and anger on the hostages. In Booker Webster’s account, “they took the American captives, ...

Thus ended what became famous in the annals of Texas as the Council House Fight. Many Texans saw this as a sign that Texas, in the Lamar era, would brook no compromises with Indians. They were right. But the Texans had also made a terrible blunder that resulted immediately in the torture-killing of the rest of the hostages, set off a massive wave of retaliatory raids against settlements that ended up taking dozens of white lives, and destroyed for years whatever confidence the Comanches had in the integrity of the Texas government. One can only wonder what William Lockhart, whose lovely six-year-old daughter was slowly roasted alive to avenge the massacre, thought of the strategy. And though the whites crowed that they had killed twelve “leading chiefs,” there is no evidence to support that claim.39 From Smithwick’s account, Spirit Talker was the leader of a relatively small group within the Penateka band. Isimanica, the most dangerous of the chiefs and far more powerful than Spirit Talker, was not there, nor was Isawaconi, who claimed to be the main chief of the Penatekas. Nor were prominent chiefs Pah-hah-yuco, Old Owl, Little Wolf, and Buffalo Hump.40 The men who were killed were without a doubt leaders, but not big chiefs. Finally, as it turned out, there was little evidence that the Comanches at the Council House were involved in any recent raids on Texas settlements.41 At the time of the attack, in fact, Isimanica had apparently been abroad among the lodges hawking t...

But now many of the paraibos were dead. Some had been killed in the disastrous 1816 smallpox epidemic that swept through Comanche, Wichita, and Caddo villages and killed as many as four thousand Comanches,5 taking fully half of the estimated eight thousand band members at the turn of the nineteenth century.

THERE IS HISTORY that is based on hard, documented fact; history that is colored with rumor, speculation, or falsehood; and history that exists in what might be termed the hinterlands of the imagination. The latter describes many of the nineteenth-century accounts of the captivity of Cynthia Ann Parker, the legendary “White Squaw” who chose the red man over the white man and a life of unwashed savagery over the comforts of “civilization.” Most are informed by a sort of bewildered disbelief that anyone, but especially a woman, could possibly want to do that. The

No one really knew what happened to her, and no one ever knew what she thought. People were thus free to indulge their prejudices. Though she became, in lore, legend, and history, the most famous captive of her era, the fact was that, at the age of nine, she had disappeared without a trace into the incomprehensible vastness of the Great Plains. Most captives were either killed or ransomed within a few months or years. The White Squaw stayed out twenty-four years, enough time to forget almost everything she had once known, including her native language, to marry and have three children and live the full, complex, and highly specialized life of a Plains Indian. She was seen twice, and only briefly: The first sighting happened ten years after her capture; the second, five years after that. Almost every other moment of that time is, in conventional historical terms, completely opaque. Plains Indians did not write letters or journals or record their legal proceedings, or even keep copies of treaties—history meant nothing to them.

As long as both of them lived, Banc and Minnie defended the Comanche tribe. Minnie Caudle “would not hear a word against the Indians,” according to her great-granddaughter. Her great-grandson said, “She always took up for the Indians. She said they were good people in their way. When they got kicked around, they fought back.”15 This is asserted against the brute facts of her own experience, which involved watching her captors rape and kill five members of her family. Banc Babb, against all reason and memory, felt the same way. In 1897 she applied for official adoption into the Comanche tribe.

But, as Williams soon discovered, this case was different. The Indians simply would not negotiate. In one account, he offered “12 mules and 2 mule loads of merchandise” for her, a princely sum for a single hostage. That was refused by the Indians who, according to a newspaper story, “say they will die rather than give her up.”21 Another had him offering “a large amount of goods and $400 to $500 in cash.”22 Still, the Indians refused. There were several reported versions of Cynthia Ann’s behavior. In one, she ran off and hid to avoid Williams and the others. In another, she “wept incessantly,” presumably at the thought of being returned. In a third version, Colonel Williams was granted permission to speak to her. She approached him, then sat down under a tree and stared in front of her, refusing to speak or even to indicate whether she understood him.

A letter written four months later from commissioners Pierce Butler and M. G. Lewis to the commissioner of Indian affairs in Washington cleared up the mystery. They suggested that the problem was not with Pah-hah-yuco or with the other headmen, who were more than willing to sell her for the right price. It was rather that “The young woman is claimed by one of the Comanches as his wife. From the influence of her alleged husband, or from her own inclination, she is unwilling to leave the people with whom she associates.”24 This was love, apparently, as difficult as that was for the white world to swallow. Either way, she wasn’t going anywhere, for any amount of money. On the mercenary frontier, this was in itself shocking news.

That was bad luck. However she landed with them, it meant that she was thrown into the middle of a social and cultural disaster of epic proportions. To use a later historical parallel, it would have been like being adopted into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1932. There was not much future in it. She thus became the helpless victim of huge, colliding historical forces utterly beyond her control. What happened to the Penatekas in the 1840s destroyed them as a coherent social organization. They did not go down quickly and they did not go down without a fight—in their death throes they were in some ways more lethal than ever, particularly in their Mexican raids—but they never recovered. Much of what was left of them, starving and demoralized, limped on to a tiny reservation in 1855, despised even by other Comanches.

Cholera was not subtle; it killed fast and explosively. Its incubation period was from two hours to five days, which meant that, from the moment of infection, it could and often did kill a healthy adult in a matter of hours. The disease is marked by severe diarrhea and vomiting, followed by leg cramps, extreme dehydration, raging thirst, kidney failure, and death.32 It was a horrible way to die, and a horrible thing to watch. The disease was transmitted by the ingestion of fecal matter, either directly or in contaminated water or food. Imagine a village of five hundred primitive people with poor or nonexistent sanitary habits in which several hundred of them have violent, uncontrollable diarrhea. The water sources would soon be infected, and then everything else would be infected, too, creating a sort of microbial nightmare. Unable to understand what was causing it, the People had no chance. Because the Nermernuh viewed illness superstitiously, the sick were often left to die alone, layering one kind of horror on another. Grief-stricken families left their dying mothers or fathers or children to flee to the “safety” of another village, only to infect them, too. The disease ripped through the rest of the plains as well. Half of the entire Kiowa tribe perished; five decades later Kiowas remembered it as the most terrible experience in tribal memory.33 Half of the southern Cheyennes died—an estimated two thousand had perished, a number that included entire bands. There was ev...

There, with the world crashing down around the southern Comanches, a son was born to Cynthia Ann and Peta Nocona. According to later interviews with his descendants, they named him Kwihnai, “Eagle.” If that is true, then the name Quanah is a nickname. Its meaning, too, is far from clear. According to his son Baldwin Parker in a later interview, the name comes from the Comanche “kwaina,” meaning “fragrant.”

Rachel died on March 19. Her infant son, Wilson P. Plummer, born on January 4, 1839, outlived her by two days.15 It is ironic that, after all she had suffered, and the thousands of miles she had traveled, her death was caused, indirectly, by her own father in what ought to have been the safety of her own home.

Comanches, meanwhile, carried a far more effective and battle-tested assortment of weapons: a disk-shaped buffalo-hide shield, a fourteen-foot plains lance, a sinew-backed bow, and a quiver of iron-tipped arrows. Their abilities with bow and arrow were legendary. In 1834, Colonel Richard Dodge, who was skeptical of the stories of their prowess, nonetheless observed that the Comanche “will grasp five to ten arrows in his left hand and discharge them so rapidly that the last will be on its flight before the first has touched the ground, and with such force that each would mortally wound a man at 20–30 yards.”

From the evidence that does exist, however, it is apparent that many young men died fighting Comanches in battles that must have been cruelly one-sided. Ranger John Caperton estimated that “about half the rangers were killed off every year” and that “the lives of those who went into the service were not considered good for more than a year or two.”23 He also wrote that, of the one hundred forty young men in San Antonio in 1839, “100 of them were killed in various fights with Indians and Mexicans.”24 (Most would have been killed by Indians.) Those are very large numbers in a town with a population of only two thousand. There is a sense, when one reads histories of the Battle at Plum Creek, or of the bloody Moore raid that followed it, that the Texans quickly mastered the art of anti-Comanche warfare. This was not true. Plum Creek was a fiasco brought on as much by Buffalo Hump’s failure to control his army and to stop them from looting as it was by the bravery of Texas fighters. Moore’s success on the Colorado was entirely the result of surprise: The Comanches did not yet believe the white man would come after them in their homelands.

And so it was remarkable that this group of violent, often illiterate, and unmanageable border ruffians should give its full and unswerving allegiance to a quiet, slender twenty-three-year-old with a smooth, boyish face and sad eyes and a high-pitched voice who looked younger than his years. His name was 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. He was one of the finest military commanders America has ever produced, a fact that San Antonians suspected as early as the late 1830s but the rest of the world would not learn until the Mexican war, when he became a national hero and his terrifying Rangers passed almost instantly into myth. Though he fought on the Texas frontier and Mexico for less than twelve years, he personally put an indelible stamp not only on the Texas Rangers—an organization that might be said to have arisen in imitation of him—but also the American West.

What happened next—seventy-five Penateka Comanches on fifteen Rangers, arrows and lances against repeating pistols—sounds like pure bloody pandemonium. Several Rangers were badly wounded. Their pistols, meanwhile, were dropping Indians from the saddle at an alarming rate. This stage of the fight lasted fifteen minutes. Then the Indians broke and fled. It became a running fight, and went for more than an hour on over two miles of rough terrain. Urged on by their heroic chief, the Indians kept rallying, regrouping, and attacking, only to be overwhelmed by the Rangers’ fire-spitting Colt revolvers. Forty Indians were now dead or wounded. One Ranger was dead and four were wounded. Still, the fight went on, as the Indian leader rallied his men again and again. Then, as though to illustrate the five-shooter’s main weakness, Hays’s men ran out of ammunition. More precisely, they had run out of preloaded cylinders, which could not be reloaded in the field, and no one had anything but five-shooters. They were now at the mercy of the thirty-five remaining Indians. Or at least they would be when the Indians figured out their ammunition had run out. Hays then coolly called out to see if anyone had any bullets left. One man, Robert Gillespie, rode forward and said he did. “Dismount and shoot the chief,” ordered Hays. This Gillespie did: At a range of “thirty steps” he dropped the chief from his saddle. The remaining Indians “in wild affright at the loss of their leader . . . scattered ...

They weren’t fast enough. Half a mile from their house, the Indians reappeared. Now they seized Martha, who was nine months pregnant. While Ezra and his two children continued on, they dragged Martha back to a point about two hundred yards from the cabin. There she was gang-raped. When they were finished, they shot several arrows into her and then did something that was unusually cruel, even for them. They scalped her alive by making deep cuts below her ears and, in effect, peeling the top of her head entirely off. As she later explained, this was difficult for the Indians to do, and took a long time to accomplish. Bleeding, she managed to drag herself back inside her house, which the heavy rain had prevented the Indians from burning, where her husband found her. She lived four days, during which time she was coherent enough to tell the story to her neighbors. She gave birth to a stillborn infant. She probably died of peritonitis: Comanches knew what it was and often aimed their arrows at a victim’s navel. Half a century later, a Palo Pinto County rancher recalled that her scalping left her a “fearful sight.”17 She was one of twenty-three people who died by the hand of Peta Nocona’s raiders over a span of two days, November 26 to November 28.

But the main problem with the Texas reservations was the white people who lived next to them. By 1858 white farms and ranches surrounded the reservations. And soon the whites were blaming the reservation Indians for raids that were being carried out by northern bands. In the fall of 1858 there were a series of savage raids all along the frontier—a settlement twenty-five miles from Fredericksburg was completely annihilated. Under the leadership of the Indian-hating newspaper editor John Baylor, settlers organized themselves and threatened to kill all of the Indians on both reservations. On December 27, 1858, a party of seventeen peaceful Indians from the reservation—Anadarkos and Caddoans—were attacked by white men while they slept. The white men fired on them, killing four men and three women. The six men who were guilty of the murders were identified but never charged. The feeling was that no jury would ever convict them, and that their arrest might stir the border into full-scale revolt. Meanwhile Baylor continued to stir up trouble, even going so far as to say that he would kill any soldier who tried to stand in his way. By the spring of 1859 the area around the reservations was in full panic. Groups of whites went about armed and looking for Indians. In May, some whites opened fire on a group of Indians. There was little doubt now that if the Indians stayed there, there would be a full-scale war. Or, more likely, a full-scale slaughter.

We will never know how Cynthia Ann Parker felt in the weeks and months after her capture by Sul Ross. There are so few comparable events in American history. But it was painfully apparent from the earliest days that the real tragedy in her life was not her first captivity but her second. White men never quite grasped this. The event that destroyed her life was not the raid at Parker’s Fort in 1836 but her miraculous and much-celebrated “rescue” at Mule Creek in 1860. The latter killed her husband, separated her forever from her beloved sons, and deposited her in a culture where she was more a true captive than she had ever been with the Comanches.

Champion had the same impression. “I don’t think she ever knew but that her sons were killed,” he wrote. “And to hear her tell of the happy days of the Indian dances and see the excitement and pure joy which shown [sic] on her face, the memory of it, I am convinced that the white people did more harm by keeping her away from them than the Indians did by taking her at first.”49 Whatever chance she may have had at contentment was destroyed in 1864 when Prairie Flower died of influenza and pneumonia.50 The little girl’s death shattered her. Now there was nothing left of her Comanche life but memories. What her day-to-day life was like in the years after that is largely unknown. The Comanche version is unambiguous: The white men broke her spirit and made her a misfit. She became bitter over her enforced captivity, refused to eat, and eventually starved herself to death.51 She lived six more years, until 1870, when she died of influenza, which may well have been complicated by self-starvation.

What happened next has been unnoticed or uncredited by the main chroniclers of Comanche history, largely because Quanah himself later forcefully denied that he was even at the Battle of Pease River or that his father had been killed there. Both assertions were untrue, and had to do with Quanah’s interest in cleansing what would have been a terrible stain on Peta Nocona’s record: The Comanches saw Pease River as a fiasco and a disgrace, and it had happened entirely on his watch. Quanah and Peanuts were at the camp because their mother said they were. She was frantic because of it. We also know that two, and only two, riders survived the fight and managed to get away.2 We know this because Charles Goodnight and ten scouts under his command tracked them from the confluence of the Pease River and Mule Creek to a large canyon near the foot of the Llano Estacado, somewhere between seventy-five and a hundred miles to the west. He never saw their faces, only the tracks of their horses.

Quanah became a war chief at a very young age. He did it in the traditional way, by demonstrating in battle that he was braver, smarter, fiercer, and cooler under fire than his peers. His transformation took place in two different fights. Both happened in the late 1860s, and both have been claimed as the vehicles of his elevation.

THE YEAR QUANAH became a warrior, 1863, was the bloodiest year in American history, though most of the blood that was shed had nothing at all to do with this ambitious Comanche boy who rode free on the western plains, stealing horses and taking scalps. The agent of death and destruction was the Civil War. That year it was transformed forever from the relatively brief, self-contained, regional conflict most people believed it would be into the malevolent, drawn-out, continent-girding affair that threatened to rip the country permanently apart. Eighteen sixty-three was the year of Chancellorsville and Chickamauga, of Vicksburg and Chattanooga, the year Robert E. Lee marched seventy-five thousand rebel troops clear into Pennsylvania, into the great heartland of the north, where they fought the Union to a grisly fifty-one-thousand-casualty draw at Gettysburg.