QUANAH NEVER FORGOT his mother. He kept the photograph Sul Ross gave him—the one taken in 1862 at A. F. Corning’s studio in Fort Worth, with Prairie Flower nursing at her breast—on the wall above his bed. She had been taken from him when he was only twelve; in a matter of minutes she had disappeared forever into the white man’s world. He later learned that she had been unhappy and that she had repeatedly tried to escape to find him. Like her son, she had adapted brilliantly to an alien culture, but she could not do it twice. In 1908 he placed ads in Texas newspapers seeking help in finding her grave. He got a response from a man named J. R. O’Quinn, his first cousin and the son of Cynthia Ann’s younger sister Orlena, who told him he knew where to find it. It was Quanah’s first contact with his Texas family. Later he heard from another cousin, who invited him to a family function in Athens, Texas, southeast of Dallas. (He would eventually be embraced and celebrated by his Texas family.) Having found his mother, he now lobbied for money to move her grave from Texas to Oklahoma. Persistent and persuasive as always, he convinced his congressman to sponsor a bill authorizing $1,000 to relocate Cynthia Ann’s bones. The bill became law in March 1909. He traveled to Texas, met some of his white family, and found the cemetery where she lay. On December 10, 1910, she was reinterred at the Post Oak Mission in Cache. At a ceremony over her grave, Quanah gave a simple speech in his fractured English. “Forty years ago my mother died,” he said. “She captured by Comanches, nine years old. Love Indian and wild life so well, no want to go back to white folks. All same people anyway, God say. I love my mother.”
He himself had less than three months to live. He had been busy in the fall of 1910 as usual, traveling to Dallas in October for a celebration known as Quanah Route Day at the Texas State Fair. Its purpose was to promote the Quanah, Acme and Pacific Railroad, which ran through the town of Quanah, Texas, just south of the old reservation. Quanah, who rarely turned down a chance to appear in public, drew an overflow crowd. According to a Dallas Morning News story from October 25, 1910, “The SRO sign was hung out yesterday afternoon at the convention hall. . . . Every seat was taken and standing room was at a premium. Chief Quanah Parker of the Comanches was, of course, the principal attraction.” He was there with his twelve-year-old son, Gussie. Both were dressed in warbonnets, buckskins, and moccasins. He spoke in a voice that was “clear and resonant and distinct to those even in the rear of the hall although his words were occasionally broken and difficult to understand.”¹ “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “I used to be a bad man. Now I am a citizen of the United States. I pay taxes same as you people do. We are the same people now.” He spoke of his mother, of stealing Mackenzie’s horses at Blanco Canyon. He told the audience about his trips to Washington to “work for my Indians,” and about meeting Roosevelt. He was funny and engaging, telling stories he had told many times before. He of course did not mention his career as a raider and killer of white people. In the best American fashion, he had carefully removed the less savory parts from his past. He took the time to deny, once and for all, that his father, Peta Nokona, had died in the battle of Pease River. He was lying, but he had a clear, and forgivable, purpose: He was trying to save his father’s reputation. Then he concluded with an odd remark. “Just one more minute, here is one more say. My ways call for money every time they send me to the fair. Two men came to me about a year ago to go to New York City. ‘I give you $5,000 for tour six months, to take your family over there.’ I say ‘No, you put me in little pen. I no monkey.’ That is all, gentlemen.” Then, as the paper noted, “as the throng crowded forward . . . he took each person by the hand and pressed it and frequently his face was wreathed in smiles.”² His last comments were, perhaps, a way of saying that he, unlike, say, Geronimo, had limits on how far he would exploit his fame and his heritage. Dignity, he was saying, had its limits. Why he was moved to point that out will remain forever a mystery. As far as we know, they were his last public words.
In February 1911, Quanah was returning by train from a visit to some of his Cheyenne friends, reportedly to seek a cure at a peyote meeting. He knew he was sick. Traveling with his number one wife, the childless To-nar-cy, he rode the train with his head bowed and lips trembling. When he arrived home in Cache, he was taken to his house by his white son-in-law Emmet Cox. He died there on February 23 of rheumatism-induced heart failure.
Word of his death moved like electricity through Oklahoma and Texas, in both white and Indian communities. By morning hundreds had gathered at Quanah’s house, with its double porch and bright red roof marked with large white stars. By noon the crowd had swelled to two thousand. Mourners came on horseback and muleback and in farm wagons and buggies and automobiles. There were whites wearing Sunday clothes and Indians in buckskins and blankets. They moved in a long, slow procession to the church, where only a small fraction of them could fit. Those outside sang and prayed. Eventually they all filed past the casket where Quanah lay adorned in his favorite buckskin, his trademark plaited hair falling over his shoulders. At the gravesite, mourners sang “Nearer My God to Thee” and then the casket, draped with brilliantly colored blankets, was lowered into the grave beside Cynthia Ann’s.
When his family sorted through his estate, they found there was not much there. He had a few hundred dollars in the bank. His wife To-nar-cy, who was recognized as his widow under Oklahoma law, took the rights to one-third of his land allotment. Wife To-pay, who had two children, aged two and eleven, got the house. His eldest son, White Parker, got the cherished, and now famous, photograph of Cynthia Ann that had hung over Quanah’s bed. Otherwise, there were a couple of horses and mules, a coach, a hack, and buggy. He did not have much else. He owed $350, a debt that was covered by the sale of his mules. That was all that remained of the last chief of the Comanches. Except for his house he had what amounted to a nomad’s possessions, a sort of symmetry that some Comanches might have appreciated. Four months after his death, the secretary of the interior ordered the Indian superintendent to eliminate the office of chief and instead to create a committee formed of members of the tribes.³ In later years there were “chairmen” but no paraibos.
The Lords of the South Plains, meanwhile, were fast fading into America. That was what aboriginal cultures did if they did not vanish altogether. It would be inaccurate to say that the Comanches adapted well, or that Quanah was a model that the tribe as a whole was prepared or equipped to follow. The first generations of Comanches in captivity never really understood the concept of wealth, of private property. The central truth of their lives was the past, the dimming memory of the wild, ecstatic freedom of the plains, of the days when Comanche warriors in black buffalo headdresses rode unchallenged from Kansas to northern Mexico, of a world without property or boundaries. What Quanah had that the rest of his tribe in the later years did not was that most American of human traits: boundless optimism. Quanah never looked back, an astonishing feat of will for someone who had lived in such untrammeled freedom on the open plains, and who had endured such a shattering transformation. In hard times he looked resolutely forward toward something better. That sentiment appears, obliquely, on his gravestone, which reads:
Resting here until day breaks
And shadows fall
And darkness disappears
Is Quanah Parker, the last chief of the Comanches.
His school-educated daughter probably wrote it, based loosely on a verse in the Song of Solomon, a book of the Old Testament that settlers, among them his forefathers, carried with them into the lethal West, where Stone Age pagans on horseback once ruled the immemorial land. Quanah would have been pleased.
