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

THE END OF the Civil War in the spring of 1865 and the collapse of the Confederacy brought final and complete chaos to the frontier. Before there had been at least a pretense of organization. Now there was nothing. The militias disappeared from the federal lands. For a period of months there could be said to be no government at all in Texas, no systems, no authority, no power. It must have seemed to the People that the good old days had returned, that the Great Father’s war had done something strange and permanent and magical to remove their old enemies from the borderlands. The Comanche numbers were still small—there were only, we must remind ourselves, maybe four thousand of them out there holding up the advance of western civilization—but a good deal of their old power had come back, and with it had come the old arrogance. Their social organization was still based on warrior status—there was, indeed, no other form of social advancement—their wealth still consisted of stolen horseflesh, and now once again they had the unfettered ability to make splendid war throughout the borderlands, both on whites and Indians.

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.¹ 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.² 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.”³ 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.”⁴ 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.⁵

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.⁶ There were an estimated four thousand Indians in attendance, which included one hundred Comanche lodges.⁷

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.⁸

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.⁹

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,¹⁰ 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:¹¹

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.¹²

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.¹³ “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.

When I was in Washington the Great Father told me that all the Comanche land was ours and that no one should hinder us in living upon it. So, why do you ask us to leave the rivers and the sun and the wind and live in houses? Do not ask us to give up the buffalo for the sheep. The young men have heard talk of this, and it has made them sad and angry. Do not speak of it more. I love to carry out the talk I get from the Great Father. When I get goods and presents I and my people feel glad, since it shows that he holds us in his eye.

If the Texans had kept out of my country, there might have been peace. But that which you now say we must live in, is too small. The Texans have taken away the places where the grass grew the thickest and the timber was best. Had we kept that, we might have done the things you ask. But it is too late. The whites have the country which we loved, and we wish only to wander on the prairie til we die.

It was even too late for that, as the Indians knew better than anyone. No free Indians were going to be allowed to wander anywhere. Ten Bears’s soaring rhetoric was elegiac, at best. He did not really think the whites were going to offer him anything better than they already had. Though Medicine Lodge was ostensibly a bargaining session, in fact there was no bargaining at all. The whites were issuing a thinly disguised ultimatum. General Sherman, who had participated in the conference as a peace commissioner but actually advocated military operations against delinquent tribes, offered them no comfort or consolation. It was clear to him, though perhaps not yet to the vast herd of public-policy-makers in Washington, that the old solutions no longer applied. The Indians could not be driven away or removed to the West. That had been the old solution, the one employed with the Creeks, Seminoles, Delawares, Iroquois, and other eastern tribes. The Plains Indians resided in the heart of the last frontier, and their land was not simply wanted as a pass-through for trains and wagons heading west. Comancheria itself was coveted by white men. Sherman told the Indians they would have to give up their old ways and learn to become farmers. And there was nothing, they were told bluntly by the man who had overseen carnage on a scale that these Indians could not possibly comprehend, they could do about it. “You can no more stop this than you can stop the sun or the moon,” he said. “You must submit and do the best you can.”¹⁴

And so they did, signing what amounted to a gigantic abstraction that was based on notions of property, on cartography and westward migration, and on the larger idea of Manifest Destiny, none of which they would ever completely comprehend. The white man would drag his treaty back to the Great Father where it would sit among the forests of granite and marble and somehow work its terrible invisible magic. The Indians were not in any way happy about what they were being asked to do. There was nothing good about it, nothing but destruction and degradation on their end, though to most of them it seemed far better to mollify the white man yet again with a treaty (especially one that came with gifts attached) than to refuse and thus unleash warmongers like Sherman. On October 21, 1867, chiefs from all of the tribes put their marks on the treaty, which of course they could not read.¹⁵ They included headmen from the Yamparika (Ten Bears, Painted Lips, Hears a Wolf, Little Horn, Dog Fat, and Iron Mountain), the Nokonis (Horse Back, Gap in the Woods) and Penatekas (Silver Brooch, Standing Feather).¹⁶ As much as a third of the tribe was not represented at the council. Mostly they were Kotsotekas and Quahadis, the two most remote bands who tended to camp together in the Llano Estacado. The Kotsotekas had signed a treaty in 1865, though they never had abided by it. The Quahadis had never signed anything, and never would. That did not matter to the U.S. peace commission: The entire tribe was presumed to have signed the agreement, and they would all be held to it. The band structure of the Comanches no longer mattered to anyone.

Among the unreconstructed elements of the Quahadis who were present at Medicine Lodge was eighteen-year-old Quanah. Why he should have been there is unknown. Quanah’s own description sounds quite casual. He had been on the warpath against the Navajo, he said. While staying at a Cheyenne village, he was told that white soldiers were coming to a great powwow and bringing beeves, sugar, and coffee. “I went and heard it,” Quanah said later. “There were many soldiers there. The council was an unusual one, a great many rows. The soldier chief said ‘Here are two propositions. You can live on the Arkansas and fight or move down to the Wichita Mountains and I will help you. But you must remember one thing and hold fast to it and that is you must stop going on the warpath. Which one will you choose?’ All the chiefs decided to move down here [to the reservation].”¹⁷

• • •

For anyone who believed that the Indians were sincere in signing the Medicine Lodge treaty, its implications would have seemed breathtaking. The treaty required nothing less than that the great and unrivaled powers of the middle and southern plains move immediately and en masse to reservations and take up modest new lives, accepting agencies, schools and farms, government teachers, blacksmiths, carpenters, and agricultural instructors, all of which they had said specifically and repeatedly that they did not want.¹⁸ They were allowed to leave the reservation to hunt, south of the Arkansas. But the treaty really meant that they would have to cease fighting and stop following the buffalo, which in turn meant that they would have to cease being Plains Indians. They would have to reorder their entire social structure around a set of values and principles that were still largely unimaginable to them. The Comanches and Kiowas were to share a 2.9-million-acre reservation in what is now southwestern Oklahoma, north and east of the Red River and its north fork, south of the Washita, and west of the 98th meridian. This was actually very good land, huntable and arable and with decent water sources, and it was in traditional Comanche territory and included Medicine Bluffs and other sacred sites. But it was a tiny fraction of Comancheria, which at its peak held nearly 200 million acres. Nor did it include by far the richest of the old hunting grounds, the Texas bison plains. The Cheyennes and Arapahos, meanwhile—only their southern bands—agreed to live on a reservation immediately to the north of the Comanche reservation.

Seen from the distance of a century and a half, the Medicine Lodge treaty can seem like a cynical document. But it did not at the time appear that way to lawmakers in the East, or to the members of the peace commission who signed it. Their efforts had inspired great hope that this would offer a final solution to the Indian problem on the southern plains. This belief was held despite the Indians’ stern protestations and the deep skepticism of the army in the West. After all, the eastern Indians had made the transition to farming life. The civilized tribes, after the horrendous attrition of the Trail of Tears, had managed to change. So could the Plains Indians. To many people the treaty seemed a fair and reasonable solution to an old and intractable problem.

They were mistaken. Instead, Medicine Lodge provided the framework for the last great betrayal of the Indians by a government that had betrayed and lied to Native American tribes more times than anyone could possibly count. The agent of the betrayal was the Office of Indian Affairs, one of the most corrupt, venal, and incompetent government agencies in American history. The new era began with the bizarre decision by J. H. Leavenworth, the appointed agent for the Comanches and Kiowas and a loud proponent of peace, to locate his agency at Fort Cobb on the Washita River, which was on the reservation of the Wichitas and affiliated bands, well north of the Comanche-Kiowa lands. Leavenworth’s ill-considered decision introduced warlike, mounted Comanches into direct proximity with Indians who farmed and lived in houses. As the Civil War years had shown with cruel clarity, this was a very bad idea.

The error was compounded when several thousand Kiowas and Comanches actually showed up at the agency in the winter of 1867–68, precisely what Leavenworth and his bosses wanted. But for some reason they had failed to anticipate that these Indians would need food. Shockingly, Medicine Lodge had not provided for Indian rations, and so the government had nothing to give them. Nor did it have any of the promised annuity goods (and would not until Congress ratified the treaty in the summer of 1868). Leavenworth himself was not to blame, but collectively the white men had made an unforgivable blunder, which meant a crushing failure of the very first post-treaty test of friendship and sincerity.

The Indians were disgusted, and furious. They believed the white men had lied to them. They were also hungry, because it was winter and they had counted on the government food to help them get through the hard season. Leavenworth tried desperately to compensate, issuing all the goods in his possession, using his breeding cattle for food, and even buying goods with unauthorized credit. But those moves were not sufficient to feed the miserable and restive Comanches. So they began to solve their problem the old way: by raiding the Wichitas and other nearby tribes. They stole cattle, horses, and mules, and if anyone got in their way he was killed and scalped. At one point the raids got so bad that the sedentary tribes were forced to stop farming altogether so they could guard their horses, mules, and cattle.

The food crisis was made worse by yet another remarkably shortsighted decision: The Office of Indian Affairs, in its ardor for peace and in its fundamental belief that these Indians were always gentle unless provoked by white men, had prohibited the stationing of troops at the agency. This was yet another catastrophic mistake, which not only gave the Comanches a free hand to ravage the Indian country, but also gave them a secure base from which to conduct their ever more frequent raids into Texas.

Leavenworth, who had strongly supported the peace plan, was soon complaining bitterly. “I recommend that [the Kiowas’] annuities, as well as the Comanches, be stopped, and all confiscated for the benefit of the orphans they have made. The guilty are demanded—according to our treaties—for punishment. And if not delivered up, then let them be turned over to the military . . . to make short sharp work with them.”¹⁹ Thus disabused of his old idealism, Leavenworth now had to contend with a thousand surly, disappointed Comanches who were back to their old habits of raiding and stealing and committing atrocities. Unable to bear the strain, he simply walked off his job in the spring of 1868. From May to October, one of the most critical times in the history of relations between Plains Indians and the U.S. government, there was no federal authority at all in the Comanche-Kiowa reservation. Traders and other white men had fled in fear of their lives. The property custodian, the only white person who remained at the agency, could do nothing but keep track of the continuing raids into Texas and count the number of scalps the raiders brought back.²⁰ It was pure chaos, pure anarchy.

When the goods finally did arrive, they were of abysmal quality. And now the Indians confronted yet another aspect of the Indian office: its corruption. The clothing the Indians had been promised was shoddy and threadbare. The pants all came in one size: large enough to fit a two-hundred-pound man. Few Comanches weighed that much. The hats they received looked like those worn by the Pilgrims. Most of the Comanches ripped the clothes up and used them for other purposes. The food was bad, too. Instead of fresh meat—which had always been their diet—they got rancid bacon or salt pork. They were given a lot of cornmeal, which they detested and fed to their horses.

None of these failures could be blamed on the tangled government bureaucracy. They were the product of the endemic corruption and graft for which the Indian office had justly become infamous by the 1860s. The Indian peace commission of 1867 had been so scandalized by what they found out in the various agencies that they wrote:

The records are abundant to show that agents have pocketed the funds appropriated by the government and driven the Indian to starvation. It cannot be doubted that Indian wars have originated from this cause. . . . For a long time these officers have been selected from partisan ranks, not so much on account of honesty and qualification as for devotion to party interests and their willingness to apply the money of the Indian to promote the selfish schemes of local politicians.²¹

As time went by, the agents proved stupid as well as corrupt. Ironically, one commodity they were actually proficient at delivering to Comanches and Kiowas was weapons. The Indians had made an eloquent plea for better rifles; without them they could not hunt effectively, they argued, and thus would be more dependent on the government. While this argument had some merit, it was also quite as obviously true that Comanches were attacking Texas homesteads and Wichita farms. Amazingly, the Indian office persuaded the Department of the Interior, in violation of laws against arming Indians, to deliver several tons of arms and ammunition to plains tribes, including Comanches. And these weapons were not shoddy at all. In a day when the standard army issue weapon was still the single-shot rife, the Indian weapons included repeating Spencer and Henry rifles and carbines.²²

Meanwhile, the heart of the Medicine Lodge treaty—the plan to turn Comanches and other horse tribes from nomadic hunter-gatherers into house-dwelling farmers—was also proving almost completely futile. A few Penatekas, long in captivity, tried to go along with the idea. But in general Comanche men simply refused to have anything to do with farming. When Leavenworth hired a white farmer in the spring of 1868 to demonstrate the planting of seeds, Comanches swooped down and plundered the fields before the crop was ripe. They ate green watermelons, which made them violently ill. The Indians only wanted beef, and eventually forced the agent to spend most of the budget on it, leaving little or nothing available to buy seed and farming tools.

The result of such efforts was to convince most Comanches that they were better off outside the reservation. On June 30, 1869, it was estimated that there were 916 Comanches on the reservation, but none of them were self-supporting farmers. All were living in tipis and subsisting on a combination of their own hunting, the undependable government food and annuities, and raids on Texas and on other tribal reserves. Many drifted off the government land to join the hostile bands in the Llano Estacado. There developed a pattern. In winter, more Comanches would arrive to camp on the reservation and to claim beeves and other food and annuity goods. In the spring they would drift back to the buffalo plains again or join raiding parties headed for the Texas frontier. It was a confusing, highly fluid situation. The one certainty was that, in spite of considerable government effort, Comanches remained Comanches. They had not yet been broken of their old habits.

• • •

Such a situation could not endure. The first casualty was the hated Office of Indian Affairs itself. In 1869, Congress did away with it, and in its place put the Indian Bureau, which soon arrived at what seemed like an ingenious compromise. The individual Indian agencies would be run by nominees from the religious community, thus minimizing the possibility of corruption. And if the Indians were converted to Christianity, so much the better. This became known as Grant’s “peace policy,” and the religious sect selected to oversee the Comanches was an extremely unlikely one: the gentle, peace-loving Quakers