Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (37 page)

His first raid was a foray with thirty warriors from a camp in southwestern Kansas. The raiding party rode south, through Oklahoma, all the way to San Antonio. The goal appears to have been horses as opposed to revenge. They indulged themselves in what, for the Comanches, was routine mischief. They stole thirty-eight horses and killed and scalped two unfortunate white men who happened to cross their path. As was often the case after raids, they were pursued by white horsemen. They rode hard for three days and outdistanced them, returning home triumphantly with their large herd and two scalps. A war dance was held in their honor.

Quanah’s second raid was more interesting. This time he rode out with sixty warriors from their camp in what is now western Oklahoma. They swept west and south, into New Mexico, ending up on the Penasco River in the eastern part of the territory. At one point they spotted a company of U.S. Army cavalry headed in the other direction. Instead of leaving them alone, which most Comanches would have done without a second thought, the
war chief decided it would be a good idea to steal the cavalry’s sixty mules. So they did. The cavalry soon followed and caught up with the Indians, who could move the balky mules only so fast. Quanah was dispatched with two other braves to drive the mules into the mountains while the rest of the party took up defensive positions in a rocky pass. A two-hour shooting fight ensued, with no casualties on either side. Night fell and the soldiers retired to their camp while the Indians, as usual, beat a fast pace toward home. They traveled all night, then all day, then all night, finally stopping and sleeping in a circle around their mules. They were so exhausted that when they awoke they found that many of their precious mules had wandered half a mile from camp. When they returned with the captured herd, another glorious war dance was held in their honor.
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In 1868, at age twenty, Quanah took part in an extended expedition into Mexico with nine warriors under the command of the Kiowa chief Tohausan, famous from the battle of Adobe Walls in 1864, where his combined forces of Comanches and Kiowas had come remarkably close to defeating a U.S. Army force commanded by the legendary Kit Carson. The Mexican raid was a classic Comanche (and Kiowa) enterprise, one of the ways young, ambitious men traditionally made their names and fortunes. In 1852, Captain Randolph Marcy described the phenomenon that took warriors away for as long as two years:

Six or nine young men set out upon one of these adventures, and the only outfit they require is a horse, with their war equipments, consisting of bows and arrows, lance and shield, with occasionally a gun. Thus prepared they set out on a journey of 1,000 miles or more, through a perfectly wild and desolate country, dependent for assistance wholly upon such game as they may chance to find. They make their way to the northern provinces of Mexico.
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But times had changed. It was now much harder to go blithely adventuring about the American southwest in search of loot and glory. Comanche power was still strong, and still dominant west of the 98th meridian and east of the Rockies and the Grand Cordillera. But it was no longer unchallenged. A line of forts had been thrown up along the San Antonio–El Paso trail whose purpose was both to protect wagon trains but also to disrupt traditional Comanche raiding patterns into Mexico. Fort Stockton, for example, was built near the site of the plentiful icy waters of Comanche Springs, one of the largest springs in Texas and for a hundred years the main way station for raiders traveling to Mexico. In a bone-dry country, the water hole was an
important landmark. Now it was useless to Quanah and his fellow braves; they would never drink its clear, chill waters again.

Tohausan’s expedition sounds remarkably inglorious. The days of the great and productive Mexican raiding were fast coming to a close. Comanches would never again be allowed to indulge themselves in the bloody, summer-long raids that emptied out whole districts in northern Mexico and left behind burning ruins over whole states, raids that produced hundreds or thousands of captured horses that then moved in long lines northward through Texas along the Comanche Trace. Quanah’s war party was out for months. Twice they went two days without water. They nearly starved in Chihuahua. They found Mexican settlements bristling with hostility and only a few horses to steal. Quanah and a friend lost their mules on the long trek back across northern Mexico and Texas. They arrived back at their village on foot. By his own account, the journey was a complete disaster. There were no victory dances to celebrate his return. If he hadn’t been so young and carefree and enthusiastic about his life, he might have noticed that time was running out for the Comanches. But this would not be in his thoughts until much later.

In 1868 he took part in some of the Comanche raids into the Texas hill country, raids that history records as extremely, vengefully violent. One was the infamous raid at the Legion Valley settlement, near present-day Llano, where seven captives were killed, including a baby and a three-year-old, and where Minnie Caudle was kidnapped.
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There is no proof that he took part in what the white people regarded as unthinkable atrocities, but this sort of raiding was in fact what young Comanche men were doing in the waning days of the plains empire, and Quanah himself was known to burn for revenge against the people who killed his father and stole his mother and sister. Their actions amounted to what we would today consider to be political terrorism. There was still status in horse-thieving, to be sure. But all Comanches knew that the one sure way to roll back the frontier was to torture, rape, and kill all of its white residents. Thus, as time went by the raids took on a more purely political character, and with good reason. There was plenty of evidence that such a strategy worked.

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. In one, the raid originated in a camp in the
Llano Estacado. The leader was a chief named Bear’s Ear. Quanah himself had grown up mostly with the Nokoni band. But councils before this expedition were held by Hears the Sunrise, who was a chief of the Yamparikas (the Yap Eaters), whose domain was traditionally above the Canadian River. Also present was Milky Way, a Penateka chief who had chosen not to go to the reservation with most of the rest of his band, and who was married to a Yamparika.
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Such commingling suggests a blurring of band loyalty, and indeed this was happening. From 1868 to 1872, Quanah spent most of his time with the Quahadis, a band that seems to have coalesced out of the Kotsotekas in the 1850s,
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perhaps out of a desire to remain aloof and pure on the high plains. He also camped a good deal with the Kotsotekas. And his raiding parties were very likely mixed. With the onslaught of whites and the reduction of the hunting ranges, the old geographic separation of bands was disappearing.

Bear’s Ear’s expedition roared east from the high flat plains, across the palisaded rock headlands and down onto the rolling, broken, and river-crossed plains, and eventually collided with the line of settlement, which had continued to roll eastward like a receding wave: It was farther east than it had been when Peta Nocona raided it in 1860. The raiders struck hard at the ranches and farms in the area of Gainesville (fifty miles north of Fort Worth). They probably killed people though this is not recorded. They managed to steal a large herd of horses, and headed home. They got as far as the Red River when they were intercepted by a force of soldiers that had been dispatched from Fort Richardson (near Jacksboro) to find them.

A bloody fight followed, during which Bear’s Ear was killed. As we have seen, the death of the chief, and thus the failure of his medicine, usually turned the tide of battle in favor of the white men. Dispirited and leaderless, the Indians often picked up the chief’s body and fled. Not this time. In the absence of Bear’s Ear, Quanah took over. “Spread out,” he yelled to his warriors. “Turn the horses north to the river.” This was a departure from Bear’s Ear’s original plan. With Quanah urging them on, the Comanches wheeled the herd about and raced over rough ground toward the river. As Quanah retreated with the others, he was pursued by a bluecoat, who fired at him. Instead of spurring his horse harder to get away, Quanah rounded on his adversary and confronted the soldier head-on. He then charged and, like a medieval jousters, the two warriors thundered toward each other, weapons out. The soldier fired his revolver. His bullet grazed Quanah’s thigh. Quanah’s arrow, meanwhile, found its mark in the man’s shoulder. He dropped
his weapon, turned his horse, and fled. But Quanah was now exposed to the fire of other soldiers. He dropped down behind his horse in the old Comanche way, and, with bullets singing all around him, raced after his own war party. Somehow they managed to swim with their stolen stock across the river to safety. The white soldiers did not pursue them. That night around the campfire the Comanche war party chose Quanah as their leader.
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The other battle took place in the summer of 1869. Quanah, sixty-three other Indians, and “some Mexicans” left camp in Santa Fe. They rode east to cattle ranches located around present-day San Angelo. These would have been the westernmost settlements in the state of Texas in that year, located not coincidentally near the U.S. Army forts Chadbourne (est. 1852) and Concho (est. 1867). As Quanah later told it, he and some of his friends discovered a cowboy camp and a small herd of horses just a few miles from Fort Concho. The Indians hid in rocks and bushes, waited until nightfall, then stampeded the horses, capturing the best ones for themselves. The cowboys fired into the darkness, but hit no one.
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The Indians continued south, riding by night, into the Texas hill country west of San Antonio, where they killed a man who was driving a team of oxen. News of the shooting traveled quickly through the settlement. Thirty men rode in pursuit of the raiders.

The whites soon caught them, and a battle ensued. According to Quanah, the white men had long-range rifles, probably buffalo guns. The Indians were losing the battle, and they began a retreat. Quanah, however, did not fall back with the rest. He concealed himself in the bushes beside the trail, and when two of the white men rode by he emerged and killed both of them with his lance, a bravura performance that was witnessed by the other warriors. They quickly re-formed and charged, and the Texans were forced into cover. A brief shooting fight followed, with no resolution. The Indians ran out of ammunition, and withdrew. That night, in council on the San Saba River, this war party, too, elected Quanah as their leader.

Quanah’s conspicuous bravery on the battlefield meant that he became, at a very young age, one of a small, select group of Comanche men who would lead the tribe’s final raiding and military expeditions in the last years of their freedom. Their world was getting noticeably smaller. The following year there were less than four thousand Comanches left in the world. Of those a mere one thousand had refused to go to the reservation.
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The most dramatic story of Quanah’s early life involves his marriage. He had many wives later in life but none of his unions was ever as dramatic as his marriage to his second wife, whose name was Weckeah. (His first wife was apparently a Mescalero Apache, about whom little is known.) The marriage probably took place in the early 1870s.
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In any case, the story begins with a familiar premise. Quanah was in love with Weckeah. They had grown up together. She was in love with him. She beaded his moccasins and bow quiver. They wanted to marry. There was just one problem: Her father, Old Bear, opposed it. This was partly because of Quanah’s white blood and partly because, as an orphan and thus a pauper, he had no standing in the tribe.
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Complicating matters was a rival suitor, one Tannap, son of Eckitoacup, who was a wealthy chief. Weckeah did not like Tannap at all.
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At the heart of Quanah’s problem was that most important unit of Comanche wealth: horseflesh. Tannap’s father, who owned a hundred horses, offered ten of them for Weckeah’s hand in marriage. Quanah could offer only one horse.

Still, Weckeah implored him to try to match Tannap’s offer. So Quanah went to his friends and managed to gather up ten horses. He then drove them to Old Bear’s tipi and presented them. Unfortunately, Eckitoacup had already heard of his plan and had doubled his offer.

Undeterred, Quanah came up with a new idea. Now he told Weckeah that their only hope was to elope. This was not uncommon in Comanche culture: An impoverished suitor often had no choice but to abscond with the bride. “When a girl learned that a rich suitor whom she did not care to marry was about to propose,” wrote Wallace and Hoebel in their classic ethnographic study of the tribe, “she might elope with the man she loved. Couples occasionally eloped when the boy was poor and unable to furnish enough ponies or other articles of value to satisfy the parents of the girl. In such a case the relatives and friends of the boy might supply the necessary ponies to soothe the dishonor suffered by the wife’s parents.”
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Quanah had no such family. Which meant that by taking Weckeah he risked death, as did Weckeah. Comanche families could be quite unforgiving about such things, and it was a simple enough matter for a powerful chief like Eckitoacup to recruit an expedition to seek retribution from a young man who had so grossly violated cultural protocols.

But Quanah had something more than simple elopement in mind. Before he and Weckeah left, he recruited what amounted to an insurance policy:
a war party of twenty-one young Comanche warriors. Together they rode south for seven hours, not breaking a trot except when crossing streams.
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This was as fast as Comanches could travel, and could only have been done with a large number of mounts for each warrior. So fearful were they of what might be pursuing them that they traveled by night for two nights, split up and rejoined a number of times, then split again into units of two, coming together at Double Mountain, near the present town of Snyder in west Texas. They finally stopped on the North Concho River near the town of San Angelo and, as Quanah put it, “went to stealin’ horses.”