IN 1889 THE U.S. Congress came up with a new and ingenious plan to steal land from the Indians. A three-man panel known as the Jerome Commission was appointed and charged with the task of negotiating with the tribes west of the 96th meridian. Their goal was to secure “the cession to the United States of all of their title.” The idea was simple: The Indians would give up their collective, tribal lands. In exchange, each Indian would be allotted a private parcel of land that would be subject to the normal laws of private property. Commissioner David Jerome told the Indians that, instead of a reservation they no longer needed, “now you have the opportunity to sell to the Great Father all that land that you cannot use for homes for his white children.”¹ The plan had teeth because of the so-called Dawes Act, passed in 1887, which allowed the president, “whenever he pleases,” to require the Indians to give up their reservations for individual allotments. In council at Fort Sill in 1892, the officials smiled and made nice and did not expect much opposition from Indians who undoubtedly could not comprehend either the idea that they would own private property or the sheer magnitude of the proposed transaction, which would affect some twenty tribes and fifteen million acres.
They had not counted on Quanah Parker. He demanded that he be told the specifics of the proposed deal. “I want to know how much will be paid for one acre, what the terms will be, and when it will be paid,” he insisted. Jerome tried to stall, assuring Quanah that he would get his answers “by and by.” But Quanah would not be put off. “When will you answer the questions?” he asked. Jerome again refused to answer, and Quanah continued to badger him, explaining that, unlike some other Indians who just wanted some quick cash in their pockets, “I want a thorough understanding. I just want to talk about business. Talk to the point.”
The next day he pressed even harder. First he dueled with the commissioners over the size of the allotments. He reminded them that the Treaty of Medicine Lodge had specified three hundred twenty acres per person instead of the one hundred sixty acres they were offering. And he wanted to know how much the government was going to pay for the land that was left over after the Indians each got their one hundred sixty acres. Pressed now, Commissioner Warren Sayre somewhat sheepishly offered up a number: $2 million. The following exchange took place in council.
Quanah: How much per acre?
Sayre: I cannot tell you.
Quanah: How do you arrive at the number of a million dollars if you do not know?
Sayre: We just guess at it.
Quanah: We would like to know how much per acre, because we have heard that some tribes received $1.25 per acre, and the Wichitas received fifty cents per acre and were dissatisfied.²
Quanah soon prevailed. The following day, an exasperated Commissioner Jerome, acknowledging that “Yesterday Mr. Parker pushed Judge Sayre hard to tell him how much . . . for one acre,” actually provided a figure. He now estimated that the government was offering a little over $1 an acre. When they insisted that the low valuation was partly due to the fact that much of the surplus land was rocky and mountainous, Quanah countered: “I have noticed that coal is burned in such localities, and that iron, silver, and gold are found in such places.” Later he added: “The mountains are all supposed to be rocks and the rocks are supposed to be worthless, but the military use them to make houses with. . . .” Thus it went, Quanah hectoring them every step of the way. He was unlike any of the other Indian leaders, who tended to be long-winded, delivering rambling, occasionally poetic complaints that did not address significant issues.
But there was no forestalling the government’s plan. The Dawes Act meant that the white man could seize the land by fiat, making the new law a mere formality. In October the Indians signed the Jerome Agreement, which, once ratified, meant that they would get one hundred sixty acres of land apiece and would sell what was left over to the government for $2 million. Quanah’s role in the final agreement is not known. He signed it, even though it was not in his interest to do so. He stood to lose more from it than any other Comanche, most notably his forty-four-thousand-acre rent-free pasture, from which he made $1,000 a year.
Quanah also understood the futility of blind resistance. Having nominally agreed to the terms of the Jerome Agreement, he spent the next eight years—the time it took the Senate to ratify it—lobbying hard for changes in its terms. He pushed for a new deal in which the Indians got to keep all of their land; he eventually championed the setting aside of an additional 480,000 acres. With help from powerful supporters in the East, the Jerome Agreement was eventually modified to include this. (The largest chunk of it, 400,000 acres, came to be known as the Big Pasture and was leased to the white cattlemen.)
The agreement became law in 1900. Another thirteen months passed before the reservation was opened. On the eve of the change some fifty thousand “sooners” flooded into the country, scouting their own properties and ignoring Indian property lines. Soldiers from Fort Sill cleared the intruders from the land, but they always came back. They stole the Indians’ livestock, and camped on Indian property.
Thus began the Comanches’ new lives as owners of property, something they had never wanted and had never really understood. Ten years later, the system had become drearily familiar. Most Comanches leased out their allotments to white ranchers and farmers and simply lived on the lease payments, supplementing them with the $100 or so each received in interest on tribal funds (from the eventual sale of the Big Pasture) and with periodic work picking cotton or harvesting grain. They retained enough land for a house and garden. Few owned any cattle; most kept a horse or two. By Comanche standards, it was an aimless, purposeless existence.³
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The division of the old Indian lands took away most of Quanah’s income. He would never again earn anything near what he made in the 1890s. His unstinting generosity, in fact, would soon make him relatively poor. But this changed very little in his life. His penury coincided with the peak of his power, influence, and celebrity.
The busy and complex scene continued unabated at his house, where he shared his food and his lodging with ever greater numbers of people. His celebrity now attracted people who simply showed up at his house wanting to meet the famous war chief and share his legendary table. But mostly the people who came were local Indians. According to his adopted white son Knox Beall, who later became the translator at the Fort Sill agency:
My father fed a great many Indians. He had a great herd of cattle and horses in 1890 and when he died in 1911 he did not have many left because he was so generous. When a person became hungry he fed them. He could not stand to see any one of his tribe go hungry.⁴
Robert Thomas, a storekeeper in Cache who knew Quanah well, offers a similar account:
By 1910, owing to his generosity and kindheartedness, he was a very poor man. A great deal of his own food supplies were given away to his tribe and there were always hundreds of Comanches camped around his home. . . . He was always kind, never speaking ill of anyone.⁵
And this man who once rode free on the high and windy plains had also lived long enough to witness the astonishing technological advances of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He found it all fascinating. He wanted to try everything. He had one of the first residential telephones in Oklahoma. He bought a car, an old ambulance for which he was ribbed by his friends, who called it a “dead wagon, ” and which was apparently driven sometimes by his “bodyguard,” a deaf and dumb Comanche named George Washington, whom everyone called Dummie.⁶ He had a railroad named after him—the Quanah, Acme and Pacific Railroad, which itself derived from the west Texas town of Quanah—and often rode in the locomotive, blowing the whistle and ringing the bell. He traveled frequently and liked staying in hotels in big cities with their gaslights and modern conveniences. 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
The events of the year 1908, when he turned sixty, suggested the distance civilization had traveled since his birth on the prairie. That year Teddy Roosevelt sent his magnificent White Fleet of steel gunships around the world, and Henry Ford introduced the mass-production automobile known as the Model T. That year Quanah himself appeared in the first two-reel western movie ever made: The Bank Robbery, filmed near his home in Cache, Oklahoma. He had a bit part. There is something more than a bit surreal, more than one hundred years later, about watching Quanah himself emerge from a stagecoach, pigtails falling down over his shoulders, or ride toward the camera. At this distance, there is simply no reconciling it with the idea of free and wild Comanches on the Llano Estacado.
Quanah also had a curious and noteworthy friendship with Teddy Roosevelt. In March 1905 he rode in an open car in Roosevelt’s inaugural parade in buckskins and warbonnet, accompanied by Geronimo, two Sioux chiefs, and a Blackfeet chief. (One of the people who witnessed that event was Robert G. Carter, the officer who had been ambushed by Quanah at Blanco Canyon and who still hated Quanah bitterly and did not understand why someone who had killed so many whites could march in such a parade.)⁸ The two men met at a party Roosevelt hosted for the chiefs. 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. His principal hosts were leading cattlemen Burk Burnett and Daniel Waggoner, and the Comanche chief Quanah Parker. This wasn’t just fun and recreation: The 400,000-acre Big Pasture where the hunt took place was one of the most hotly contested pieces of land in the West. By virtue of the revised Jerome Agreement, the Indians held title to it and leased it to the likes of Burnett and Waggoner. But a large group of land-hungry whites, supported by Texas congressman James H. Stephens, wanted the government to buy the land and open it for development.
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. There is no record of what he said, but he later told his friend R. B. Thomas that “I got more cheers than Teddy.”¹⁰ Roosevelt clearly liked and admired him. “There was Quanah Parker the Comanche chief,” he wrote in his description of the wolf hunt (which had bagged seventeen wolves and coyotes) in his book Outdoor Pastimes of the American Hunter, “in his youth a bitter foe of the whites, now painfully teaching his people to travel the white man’s stony road.”¹¹
After the wolf hunt, Roosevelt traveled north to visit Quanah at Star House, a truly momentous occasion in tiny Cache, Oklahoma, for which all conceivable pomp and circumstance were brought to bear. Quanah made a point of serving wine (which he never drank) in large goblets, specifically because at the White House Roosevelt had served the Indians wine in small goblets.¹² In his typical fashion, Quanah used the occasion to lobby Roosevelt on Indian issues. The main one was the disposition of the 400,000 acres; Quanah wanted the Indians to retain it. (He eventually lost the battle: Two years later the land was divvied up and sold off, with Comanche children born after 1900 receiving 160-acre parcels; proceeds went into an Indian trust.) Quanah also complained of territorial officers trying to collect taxes from Indians, and of the Indians’ terrible unemployment problem. Evidence that Roosevelt listened came in a letter he wrote a few days later to the commissioner of Indian affairs. “My sympathies have been much excited and I have been aroused by what I have seen here, and I am concerned at the condition of these Indians and seeming hopelessness of their future.”¹³ 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 remained an active leader, even into his old age. Unhappy with the Indian schools, and finding that his children were unwelcome in the white ones, he put on his broad-brimmed Stetson and wool suit and went lobbying for a new school district. He donated the land, promised that his tribesmen would pay taxes, and got it done. In June 1908 he became head of the school board in the district he had started.¹⁴ He became one of the leading religious figures in the Comanche tribe and the driving force behind the establishment of the peyote religion among the Plains Indians. Peyote is a small, spineless cactus whose ingestion produces visual and auditory hallucinations. It had been used by Comanches as early as the mid-nineteenth century, and the Indians of south Texas had used it as early as 1716. Quanah revived its use and refined it into a meaningful religious ritual that Indians embraced during the grim early days on the reservation. He would preside over all-night rituals, many of which were concerned with the healing of specific people. From his Comanches it spread to Kiowas, Wichitas, Pawnees, and Shawnees before the turn of the century. Between 1900 and 1907 it was adopted by the Poncas, Kickapoos, and Kansas, and subsequently spread throughout the plains and into the Great Basin and deserts of the Southwest. Wrote Wallace and Hoebel: “It was probably the most important cultural contribution of Comanches to the lives of other American Indians.”¹⁵ 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.” The practice eventually evolved into the entity that became known as the Native American Church.
In spite of his success, and his eventual triumph over his rivals, Quanah’s life was never easy. He had to fight to keep prosecutors away from his peyote cult. As he got older he had marital troubles; several of his wives ended up leaving him, perhaps because of his growing financial problems. And he struggled constantly with political rivals in the tribe, including the old medicine quack Isa-tai, who never gave up in his quest to become the principal chief of the Comanches, and the Kiowa Lone Wolf, with whom he once had a fistfight over a boundary dispute.¹⁶ Charges made by Lone Wolf’s Kiowa faction, aligned with Isa-tai, in fact, led to a federal investigation of the agency in 1903. The federal agent who investigated, one Francis E. Leupp, not only concluded that Quanah and the agent had done nothing wrong, he had this to say about Quanah:
If ever nature stamped a man with the seal of headship she did it in his case. Quanah might have been a leader and a governor in any circle where fate might have cast him—it is in his blood. His acceptability to all but an inconsiderable minority of his people is plain to any observer, and even those who are restive under his rule recognize its supremacy. He has his followers under wonderful control, but, on the other hand, looks out for them like a father.¹⁷
The contrast could not be greater with his more famous neighbor, Geronimo, who had been relocated to Fort Sill from Alabama in 1894. Unlike Quanah, he attracted no crowds and few visitors. Though he was a genius at self-advertising, and made a lot of money selling his signatures, bows and arrows, and such (he reportedly died with $10,000 in his bank account), he was not well liked in Indian country. Hugh Scott, an officer at Fort Sill and a great friend to Indians, described him as “an unlovely character, a cross-grained, mean, selfish old curmudgeon.” He drank and liked to gamble, and died from injuries he received by falling off his horse while drunk.¹⁸ The two men’s legacies stand very much in contrast even in death. Geronimo is buried in the Apache Cemetery in Fort Sill, whose address happens to be 437 Quanah Road.
