Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (41 page)

The weird time warp persisted: As teenagers, Quanah and his peers were living, hunting, and raiding just as their fathers and grandfathers had done, as though hundreds of thousands of white people were not poised to rush headlong into Comanche lands at the first sign of weakness or opportunity. The tribe had a thriving new business, too, to add to selling stolen horses
and captives: cattle thieving. These years had seen the beginning of the great cattle operations in Texas. In the west, the Quahadis had transformed themselves into a sort of bovine clearinghouse. They stole cattle from Texas—Charles Goodnight put the number rustled during the Civil War years at an astonishing 300,000 head—and traded them through Comancheros to government contractors in New Mexico, who sold them to the U.S. Army.
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General Carleton, to be precise. In some cases, they were actually selling Carleton back his own cattle. In exchange, the Comanches received the guns and ammunition—increasingly revolvers and high-quality carbines—that had been deployed against Kit Carson at Adobe Walls. The business was so good that some wealthy Anglo-Americans got into it, furnishing capital to the Mexican traders.
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Carleton knew all about this ingenious commercial two-step and it made him furious.

What had happened was that the state and territorial militias, the core of frontier defense for four years, had simply melted away. In the Confederacy they were forcibly disbanded. But they disappeared in Union areas as well. There were political and organizational reasons for this. During the war large numbers of volunteers had been raised under the government’s emergency powers. These were the troops under the command of Carson and Chivington. With the end of the war few wanted to remain on permanent duty, and thus most of them were now released. The U.S. military, meanwhile, was undergoing a rapid downsizing that by 1866 would draw the total number of troops down to seventy-five thousand, and the eight thousand regulars that Ulysses S. Grant sent to Texas as an army of occupation were entirely concerned with affairs other than fighting Indians. When the governor of Texas later tried to fill this military void with state troops, the federal government refused to allow it. Demilitarizing the South was a priority of the reconstruction era, and Washington was not going to permit rebellious Texas to raise its own armies again. Nor was Congress, groaning under an enormous war debt, inclined to spend money on costly campaigns against a relatively small group of savages who posed no direct threat to the nation.

There was something else, too, that contributed to this lack of will to stop Indian raiding on the western frontier. This was the particular and very strong belief shared by many people in the civilized East that the Indian wars were principally the fault of white men. The governing idea was that the Comanches and other troublesome tribes would live in peace if only they were treated properly, and the farther its devotees were from the bleeding
frontier, the more devoutly they believed it. This was the old fight between the army, who knew better, and the “rosewater dreamers” in the Indian office, who called their uniformed adversaries “butchers, sots determined to exterminate the noble redmen, and foment wars so they had employment.”
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As General John Pope later observed, the army found itself in a no-win position. “If successful, it is a massacre of Indians; if unsuccessful, it is worthlessness or imbecility, and these judgments confront the Army in every newspaper and in public speeches in Congress and elsewhere—judgments by men who are absolutely ignorant of the subject.”
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Reports of Chivington’s massacre and white atrocities in Minnesota seemed to prove what the army’s critics were saying.

The notion that the trouble with Plains Indians was entirely due to white men was spectacularly wrongheaded. The people who cherished it, many of whom were in the U.S. Congress, the Office of Indian Affairs, and other positions of power, had no historical understanding of the Comanche tribe, no idea that the tribe’s very existence was based on war and had been for a long time. No one who knew anything about the century-long horror of Comanche attacks in northern Mexico or about their systematic demolition of the Apaches or the Utes or the Tonkawas could possibly have believed that the tribe was either peaceable or blameless. Except in the larger sense, of course. The Comanches had been first on that land, if that counted for anything, and the westering Anglo-Europeans were the clear aggressors. If the
taibos
agreed to stop the advance of their civilization precisely at the 98th meridian, and kept their western settlements bottled up beyond the Rockies, and refused to build transcontinental railroads or permit pioneers to cross the plains on the Santa Fe and Oregon trails, then a lasting peace might have been made with the Comanches. But these same Indian advocates would never have denied the fundamental right of white Americans to fully possess their continent.

Such beatific urges toward peace, combined with relentless and brutal raiding by Comanches in Texas and the Indian Territory led to the last and most comprehensive treaty ever signed by the Indians of the southern plains. The conference that spawned it took place in October 1867 at a campground where the Kiowas held medicine dances, about seventy-five miles southwest of the present site of Wichita, Kansas. The place was known as Medicine Lodge Creek. The participants were members of a U.S. peace commission
and representatives of the Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Kiowa Apache tribes. The conference was the last great gathering of free Indians in the American West. The event was magnificent, surreal, doomed, absurd, and bizarre, and surely one of the greatest displays of pure western pageantry ever seen. Nine newspapers sent correspondents to cover it.
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The council began, as many treaty meetings did, with each side making a great effort to impress the other. The U.S. peace commission, which included the commissioner of Indian affairs and William Tecumseh Sherman, the head of the army in the West, arrived with an entourage so large that it required a wagon train and fifteen or twenty ambulances to transport them. They were accompanied by a splendidly mounted guard of five hundred soldiers in dress uniform, dragging their lethal, snub-nosed mountain howitzers behind them. The white men had brought with them a large quantity of gifts, too, and set up huge mobile kitchens to feed everyone. Soon after they arrived they sent a rush order for additional supplies of fifteen thousand pounds of sugar, six thousand pounds of coffee, ten thousand pounds of hard bread, and three thousand pounds of tobacco.
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There were an estimated four thousand Indians in attendance, which included one hundred Comanche lodges.
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Once the soldiers had drawn up before the Indian camp, something extraordinary happened. It was described by Alfred A. Taylor, later the governor of Tennessee, who covered the council as a reporter, as follows:

By this time, thousands of mounted warriors could be seen concentrating and forming themselves into a wedge-shaped mass, the edge of the wedge pointing toward us. In this sort of mass formation, with all their war paraphernalia, their horses striped with war paint, the riders bedecked with war bonnets and their faces painted red, came charging in full speed toward our columns. . . .
      When within a mile of the head of our procession, the wedge, without hitch or break, quickly threw itself into the shape of a huge ring or wheel without hub or spokes, whose rim consisted of five distinct lines of these wild, untutored, yet inimitable horsemen. This ring, winding around and around with the regularity and precision of fresh-oiled machinery, approached nearer and nearer to us with every revolution. Reaching within a hundred yards of us at breakneck speed, the giant wheel or ring ceased to turn and suddenly came to a standstill.
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This maneuver was enormously impressive to the white people, not least because it amounted to a test of faith. The giant, spinning wheels-within-wheels formation was a trademark of plains warfare, and the sight of it whirling ever closer would have been eerily familiar to the soldiers who sat their
horses in that long parade line. There was also a hint of sadness in all of this martial pomp and circumstance, and many who were there sensed it. The very purpose of the council was to end once and for all this sort of behavior, or to render it meaningless and ceremonial. Such an exhibition, indeed, would be witnessed only a few more times before it passed forever into myth and history and phonied-up traveling shows like Buffalo Bill’s.

The council opened with a ritual smoking of the peace pipe, and then the commissioners began the proceedings with a good old-fashioned scolding of the assembled horse tribes. The Indians were reminded that, in shameful violation of their treaties, they had been making war on whites. Said Senator John B. Henderson, chairman of the committee on Indian affairs, this “made the hearts of our people very sad.” He did note that “we are greatly rejoiced to see our red brethren so well disposed toward peace.” What the Great Father wanted, he patiently explained, as though to children, was to give the Indians their own lands away from the white settlements. They would be given tools and seeds. They would be taught how to farm. A carpenter would show them how to build houses. Schools would be built for them to teach them to read. And while they learned these things, the Great Father would also provide $25,000 worth of clothing and other necessary items every year for thirty years. In exchange, the Indians had to cease all hostilities, reside on the lands provided, and promise not to interfere with white roads, rails, forts, or other development.
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The Indians were invited to tell their side of the story, which they were eager to do. The first speaker, Kiowa chief Satanta, set the tone for what was to follow. He began by rubbing sand over his hands. He shook hands with the participants in the council circle,
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then proceeded to tell them that he wanted nothing to do with the white man’s notion of peace. He said:

This building homes for us is all nonsense. We don’t want you to build any for us. We would all die. Look at the Penatekas. Formerly they were powerful, but now they are weak and poor. I want all my land even from the Arkansas south to the Red River. My country is small enough already. If you build us houses, the land will be smaller. Why do you insist on this? What good can come of it?

Speaking next for the Comanches was Penateka chief Tosawa (Silver Brooch), who knew a great deal about what happened to horse Indians on the reservation. Speaking in what one observer described as a “calm, argumentative voice,” he delivered a blunt condemnation of the plan:
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A long time ago the Penateka Comanches were the strongest band in the nation. The Great Father sent a big chief down to us and promised medicines, houses and many other things. A great, great many years have gone by, but those things have never come. My band is dwindling away fast. My young men are a scoff and a byword among the other nations. I shall wait til next spring to see if these things shall be given to us; if they are not, I and my young men will return to our wild brothers to live on the prairie.
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The most impressive address of all—indeed, it was a showstopper—came from Ten Bears, the aging Yamparika chief who had battled Kit Carson at Adobe Walls, who gave one of the most eloquent speeches ever made by an American Indian. In its extraordinary evocation of violence, beauty, suffering, and loss, Ten Bears’s words astounded the white participants (for whom it was translated). Among his topics, he described his reactions to the 1864 fight, offering a perspective that would have amazed his adversaries, who tended to believe that Indians did not have the same sort of feelings as they did. Before he began his speech, he put on a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles, which made him look strangely bookish, though he was illiterate.
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“My heart is filled with joy when I see you here,” he began,

as the brooks fill with water when the snows melt in the spring; and I feel glad as the ponies do when the fresh grass starts in the beginning of the year. . . .

My people have never first drawn a bow or fired a gun against the whites. There has been trouble between us . . . my young men have danced the war dance. But it was not begun by us. It was you who sent out the first soldier. . . .

Two years ago I came upon this road, following the buffalo, that my wives and children might have their cheeks plump and their bodies warm. But the soldiers fired on us . . . so it was upon the Canadian. Nor have we been made to cry once alone. The blue-dressed soldiers and the Utes came out from the night . . . and for campfires they lit our lodges. Instead of hunting game they killed my braves, and the warriors of the tribe cut short their hair for the dead.

So it was in Texas. They made sorrow in our camps, and we went out like the buffalo bulls when the cows are attacked. When we found them we killed them, and their scalps hang in our lodges. The Comanches are not weak and blind, like the pups of a dog when seven sleeps old. They are strong and far-sighted, like grown horses. We took their road and we went on it. The white women cried and our women laughed.

But there are things which you have said to me which I do not like. They were not sweet like sugar, but bitter like gourds. You have said that you want to put us on a reservation, to build us houses and make us medicine lodges. I do not want them. I was born under the prairie, where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures and everything drew a free breath. I want to die there and not within walls. I know every stream and wood between the Rio Grande and
the Arkansas. I have hunted and lived over that country. I live like my fathers before me and like them I lived happily.