SWNOVELS Empire of the Summer Moon: Chapter 19
BY THE LATE summer of 1874 there were only three thousand Comanches left in the world. That was the rough estimate made by the agents at Fort Sill, and it is probably close to the truth. Two thousand of them lived on the Comanche-Kiowa reservation in the southwestern part of what is now Oklahoma. These were the tame Comanches, the broken Comanches. The other thousand had refused to surrender. That group included no more than three hundred fighting men, all that was left of the most militarily dominant tribe in American history.¹ There were also a thousand untamed Southern Cheyennes and a comparable number of renegade Kiowas and Kiowa Apaches. Probably three thousand “hostiles” in all. Eight hundred warriors, at most, on all of the southern plains.² Unfortunately for later novelists and filmmakers, they were not arrayed in battle lines on a mesa top, spearheads gleaming in the sun, awaiting the arrival of the bluecoats’ main force. There would be no Thermopylae, no epic last stand. This was guerrilla war. As always, the Indians were scattered in various camps and bands. Along with the hostile outliers of the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Northern Arapaho on the plains north of Nebraska, they were the last of their kind.
Remarkably, these remnants of once powerful tribes all found themselves in the same place: the northern Texas Panhandle. This was not accidental. The panhandle plains were close to the reservations, whose western boundaries were less than a hundred miles to the east. All of the hostiles (even the Quahadis) had camped on the government’s land at various times. Some had wintered on the reservations. Many of the apparent “reservation” Indians, moreover, were not, as we have seen, really permanent residents. Indians who docilely queued up to receive federal beef in January might well be raiding the Palo Pinto frontier under the summer moon.
But the best reason to camp in the panhandle was that, in all of the southern plains, there was no better place to hide. In the general vicinity of present-day Amarillo, the dead-flat Llano Estacado gave way to the rocky buttes and muscular upheavals of the caprock, where the elevation fell as much as a thousand feet. Into this giant escarpment the four major forks of the Red River had cut deep, tortuous canyons, creating some of the most dramatic landscapes in the American West. The spectacular Palo Duro Canyon, carved out over the geologic aeons by the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River, was a thousand feet deep, one hundred twenty miles long, between a half-mile and twenty miles wide, and crossed by innumerable breaks, washes, arroyos, and side canyons. This was long the Quahadis’ sanctuary. Nestled in the middle of the panhandle plains, an area roughly the size of Ohio, it offered the last free Indians some small chance of delaying the inevitable reckoning with this burgeoning nation of thirty-nine million that was impatient to get on with its destiny.
In August and September the full might of the western army was finally summoned forth to hunt, engage, and destroy what was left of the horse Indians. Sheridan’s idea was that the Indians would be harried through four seasons, if necessary. They would be given no rest, no freedom to hunt. They would be starved out. Their villages would be found and burned, their horses taken from them. That this action was probably two decades late was irrelevant now. The will was there, and all editorial opinion in the land supported it.
The final campaign took the form of five mounted columns designed to converge on the rivers and streams east of the caprock. Mackenzie commanded three of them: his own crack Fourth Cavalry was to march from Fort Concho (present-day San Angelo), and probe northward from his old supply camp on the Fresh Water Fork of the Brazos; Black Jack Davidson’s Tenth Cavalry would move due west from Fort Sill; and George Buell’s Eleventh Infantry would operate in a northwesterly direction between the two.³ From Fort Bascom in New Mexico, Major William Price would march east with the Eighth Cavalry, while Colonel Nelson A. Miles, a Mackenzie rival and a man destined to become one of the country’s most famous Indian fighters, came south with the Sixth Cavalry and Fifth Infantry from Fort Dodge, Kansas. They would rely heavily on Mackenzie’s knowledge of the land. In all, forty-six companies and three thousand men took the field, the largest force ever sent against Native Americans.⁴ Unlike previous expeditions, including Mackenzie’s, they would have permanent supply bases. They would be able to stay in the field indefinitely. In military terms they had other advantages, too, including raw firepower. But the principal, overwhelming edge they had was that their adversaries would be forced to take the field carrying all their women, children, old men, lodges, horse herds, and belongings with them.
What followed became known to history as the Red River War. It loomed large in the national consciousness not because it was a real war—it was more of an antiguerrilla campaign—but because of its grand finality. Over the years people had spoken of the last frontier and dreamed of it, but now that romantic idea came fully into focus: the last frontier. You could see it, grasp it; the end of the horse tribes’ dominion was the end of the very idea of limitlessness, the end of the old America of the imagination and the beginning of the new West that could be measured and divided and subdivided and tamed first by cattlemen and then by everybody else. Within a few years barbed wire would stretch the length and breadth of the plains.
- • •
Before that could happen, the Indians had to be found. Even though they were traveling as entire communities, in such a large area the task was still extremely difficult, as Quanah had so brilliantly demonstrated at Blanco Canyon three years before. The five columns stayed in the field for four to five months, crossing and recrossing the various forks of the Red, climbing and descending the caprock, marching and countermarching and following a maddeningly desultory set of trails left by many independent bands of Indians. The soldiers’ mad sorties here and there call to mind the Keystone Kops: much frantic pursuit with little to show for it. The Indians may not have fully understood the nature of the campaign against them, but they absolutely understood that they could not beat any of the columns in open battle. So they avoided them, shadowed them; attacked only when they found a small, detached party; or came at night to stampede horses.
It was thus a war with only a handful of major engagements. Colonel Nelson Miles, first in the field, drew first blood. On August 30 he found and attacked a large body of warriors, mostly Cheyennes, near Palo Duro Canyon. His estimates of the enemy force were wildly exaggerated: He claimed to have fought four hundred to six hundred warriors, which is in retrospect completely implausible, then later to have tracked a village containing as many as three thousand people. The latter is purely impossible. In his inflated reports he was one-upping Mackenzie, with whom he had a sharp rivalry, inventing enormous cohorts of the enemy that did not exist. (Mackenzie did not parry; his reports were terse, understated, and made even dramatic engagements sound boring.) In a running, twelve-mile, five-hour fight, Miles killed twenty-five Indians and wounded more, while suffering only two wounded. He burned a large village.⁵ In mid-September, William Price encountered a hundred Comanches and Kiowas. A fierce one-and-a-half-hour fight ensued, in which the Indians fought bravely to screen the escape of their families, then withdrew. In October, Buell burned two villages but managed to kill only one Indian. That same month Black Jack Davidson ran down a group of sixty-nine Comanche warriors along with two hundred fifty women and children and two thousand horses. They surrendered to him. In November a detachment of Miles’s Fifth Infantry attacked and routed a group of Cheyennes on McClellan Creek. The unnerved Indians broke and fled out on to the plains, leaving most of their possessions behind. The infantry’s claims of bravery were somewhat muted when they learned that the Cheyennes could not have returned fire if they had wanted to: They had run out of ammunition.⁶ So it went. The campaign played out mostly in dozens of small actions that stretched over the fall, as the bluecoats and Indians played a vast game of hide-and-seek in the breaks below the caprock. The Indians did not lose all the engagements: On November 6, one hundred Cheyennes under their chief Graybeard ambushed twenty-five men from Price’s Eighth Cavalry, killing two, wounding four, and forcing the whites to retreat.⁷ The war dragged on across the upper panhandle, through a cold, rainy season so muddy and wet that the Indians called it the Wrinkled Hand Chase.
The most important battle—one that was deserving of the name—was fought by Mackenzie’s Fourth Cavalry. The converging columns had been his idea in the first place: In theory, the Indians would be driven by one force into another, cornered and destroyed. That was more or less what happened in late September, beneath the spectacular red, brown, white, and ochre battlements of Palo Duro Canyon.
Mackenzie’s troops had taken the field on August 23, marching north from Fort Concho in columns of four: 560 enlisted men, 47 officers, 3 surgeons, and 32 scouts—642 in all. They had gone to their old supply camp in Blanco Canyon, on the Freshwater Fork of the Brazos. Then they turned north, up the familiar trail that ran along the razor edge of the Llano Estacado, where Quanah had schooled them three years before in the fine art of escape. The summer had been dry and brutally hot; as the men marched they were enshrouded in a fog of dust. On their first night out, a howling wind sent sparks from their campfires into the desiccated grass, setting it afire and almost destroying their camp. They were used to this now. Because of their experience in the field, and because of Mackenzie’s relentless drilling, the Fourth had become the toughest, most seasoned force ever to fight Plains Indians.⁸ He was supported by two crack commanders: Captain Eugene B. Beaumont, a veteran of the mauling of Shaking Hand’s village on the North Fork of the Red in 1872, who had fought at Gettysburg and had marched with Sherman through Georgia; and Captain N. B. McLaughlin, a Civil War brigadier general who had been the hero of Mackenzie’s attack on the Kickapoo village in Mexico in 1873.⁹ Because of Mackenzie’s intimacy with the terrain—the other commanders followed the roads he blazed during his 1872 expeditions, now known as the Mackenzie Trail—he was given enormous freedom to do what he wanted. “In carrying out your plans,” he was informed by his commanding officer in Texas, General C. C. Augur, “you need pay no regard to Department or Reservation lines. You are at liberty to follow the Indians wherever they go, even to the agencies.” If the Indians fled to Fort Sill he was “to follow them there, and assuming Command of all troops there at that point, you will take such measures as will ensure entire control of the Indians there.”¹⁰
Mackenzie’s troops had scouted for more than a month, fought a few small actions with Comanches who melted away into the canyon lands, and braved torrents of rain that had begun in September and turned the ground into a glutinous mud. Mackenzie was irritable and, as usual, impatient. Riding long distances took a tremendous toll on his shattered body. He drove the men hard, snapping the stumps of his fingers and railing against the conditions that kept his wagon train mired in knee-deep sludge. At dawn on September 25, with his wagons stuck in mud, he left them behind and headed northwest. Walking part of the way to preserve the horses, his men marched twenty grueling miles to Tule Canyon, another starkly beautiful formation etched into the edges of the Llano Estacado, cut by Tule Creek, which flowed north to join the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red in Palo Duro Canyon. At sunset one of his scouts rode in with the news Mackenzie had been waiting for: Up ahead, among the many trails leading crazily off in all directions, there was one very big one, made by about fifteen hundred horses. It led east.
Though his men were bone-weary from the long and muddy march, Mackenzie ordered them back in their saddles. They rode on in darkness, a long dark column moving under a bright harvest moon through thick buffalo grass that muffled the horses’ hooves.¹¹ They followed the trail for five miles, expecting attack at any moment. Mackenzie was aware that his quarry was all around him, silent and elusive as ghosts. When his troops camped for the night, the horses were picketed under a strong guard. The men slept with their boots on and their weapons to hand. Mackenzie stayed in camp the next day, waiting for his supply train to catch up with him. That night, remembering the painful lessons of Blanco Canyon and Shaking Hand’s village, and sensing the presence of many Indians, Mackenzie redoubled his precautions. Under his orders, each horse was not only hobbled, meaning that its front legs were tied together, but also cross-sidelined, meaning that forefeet were tied to opposite hind feet. The horses were then secured with thirty-foot, one-inch-thick ropes, which were tied to fifteen-inch iron stakes driven deep into the ground.¹² In addition, “sleeping parties” of twelve to twenty men each were posted around the horse herd.¹³ Mackenzie was taking no chances.
As he had expected, the Indians attacked in force that night. The first charge came at ten-thirty. Comanches under the command of Shaking Hand, Wild Horse, and Hears the Sunrise galloped through the perimeter of the camp, firing and yelling, trying to stampede the horses. When this did not work they regrouped and began circling, still hoping to steal the horses. But now they were facing a withering return fire from the horse guards. The Indians withdrew around one o’clock. The next morning, Mackenzie’s men rode out of camp to find a line of Comanches on high, level ground. Mackenzie attacked, the Indians retreated. Mackenzie lost only three horses. The only human casualty happened when a Tonkawa scout named Henry shot the horse out from under an elaborately feathered (in northern plains style) Comanche warrior. Henry rode in for the kill, but had forgotten to load his rifle. He was dragged down by his adversary, who began to beat him with his bow. The army troopers, standing nearby and watching, found this amusing. Each time another blow landed on the poor Tonkawa, he pleaded with his friends: “Why you no shoot? Why you no shoot?” Tiring of the joke, one of the soldiers finally shot the Comanche. The Tonk scalped him.¹⁴ The Comanche, of course, knew he was going to die from the moment he lost his horse. While the troopers were snickering, he was fighting his death fight. Such casual cruelty was worthy of a Comanche. It is worth noting that the brave was not carrying a firearm of any kind.
Mackenzie now moved to offense. He ordered the mules loaded with twelve days’ rations. Once again he left his supply train—under guard of his infantry and one company of cavalry—then marched southwest, up Tule Canyon. His enemies were no doubt gratified to see him moving away from their camps.
But this was merely a feint executed by a commander who was intimately familiar, as no other white commander was, with the trails through the canyon lands. Mackenzie knew precisely where the Comanche camp was, and was traveling there by the most direct route possible. He had apparently learned of the location of the enemy camp from a captured Comanchero whom Mackenzie had stretched out, presumably painfully, on a wagon wheel. The scouts, riding twenty-five miles out from the main column, had then verified it. The troopers of the Fourth Cavalry held their course until dusk, when the Indians could no longer easily track their movement. They then turned abruptly north, crossing Tule Canyon in the tracks of Mackenzie’s 1872 exploration, and headed out across the muddy plains toward Palo Duro Canyon. He marched the men mercilessly through the night over rough terrain, covering the distance in twelve hours.¹⁵ As the sun was just lighting the eastern sky on September 28, the seven companies of the Fourth rode up to the abrupt edge of a yawning chasm in the earth: This was Palo Duro, six miles wide, just below its junction with a half-mile-wide side canyon known as Blanca Cita.
The men crept to the edge of the cliff, where the land fell away in a nine-hundred-foot vertical drop. They were astonished to see below them, stretching for three miles along a stream, five distinct Indian villages consisting of two hundred lodges and a large herd of horses. The white men were looking into the sanctum sanctorum of Comancheria. Inside this prodigious scar in the earth caused by ninety million years of erosion was a world unto itself, a graceful canyon split by a meandering river and greened with juniper, hackberry, wild cherry, mesquite, and cottonwood. At the bottom of the gorge was a stream of crystal-clear water that fell from a spring at the canyon’s edge. Though the taibos did not know this at the time, camped there were Comanches under a chief named O-ha-ma-tai (the majority of them), Kiowas under Maman-ti, and a small group of Cheyennes under Iron Shirt.
Mackenzie now took what seemed to at least some of his men to be a huge risk. After wandering for a mile along the canyon rim, he discovered a small, precipitous goat trail leading to the canyon floor and into what one of his men later called “the jaws of death.”¹⁶ Standing at the head of the tiny trail, he turned to his lieutenant and said simply, “Mr. Thompson, take your men down and open the fight.”¹⁷ The men dismounted and, stumbling, slipping, and sliding, one by one eventually reached the bottom.
The risk lay in the exposure of the troops as they came down. It took nearly an hour to get all seven companies down. They got lucky. Maman-ti, the Kiowa chief and medicine man, had consulted the spirits and assured the Indians camped there that they were in no danger of attack from the bluecoats, so they slumbered without sentries that day. Once again their medicine had given away an enormous advantage to the whites. Most of the soldiers reached the valley floor before the Indians realized it. As soon as they spotted the soldiers descending the canyon walls, they responded as they usually did when their village was attacked: They fought fiercely in order to cover the escape of their families. Wrote Sergeant John Charlton:
[They] attacked us from every quarter, first by dozens, later by hundreds. . . . Many were concealed behind rocks while others were ambushed in the foliage of cedars. . . . The warriors held their ground for a time, fighting desperately to cover the exit of their squaws and pack animals, but under the persistent fire of the troops they soon began falling back.¹⁸
The troops advanced, with Mackenzie in the lead, through village after village of abandoned Indian lodges. The ground was littered with buffalo robes and dried buffalo meat but also a wide array of white men’s goods, evidence of the deep cultural contamination that had seeped into all corners of plains life: army blankets, tinner’s snips, stone china, cooking kettles, breech loaders with ammunition, bales of calico, and sacks of flour. The women had evidently gathered these items up in order to save them, then dropped them as they panicked and fled up the canyon on horseback. What ensued was a four-mile running fight, during which four Comanches were killed. But soon the troopers were surrounded by Indians again, who now fired down on them from the canyon walls, a circumstance that suggested they had trapped themselves. “How will we ever get out of here?” one frightened trooper asked, afraid the command could be annihilated. Hearing this, Mackenzie snapped back: “I brought you in. I will take you out.”¹⁹ Mackenzie ordered the men forward into the teeth of the attack. His audacity worked: The Indians turned and retreated up the walls of Blanca Cita Canyon, following in the path of their families who had fled earlier.
Mackenzie did not follow. Instead, he turned back and ordered the villages burned. Bonfires roared; the scent of burning buffalo meat filled the air along with the smells of scorched Indian Department flour and sugar. Around three o’clock, his companies climbed back up the canyon walls, this time with 1,424 captured horses. Once up on the high plains again, the five hundred or so men formed a “hollow square,” a sort of living corral in which the captured herd was driven along. They marched twenty miles, returning to their supply camp in Tule Canyon at one a.m. The men, who had been awake and in the saddle for thirty-one of thirty-three hours, were exhausted. Sergeant Charlton, who tried to sleep, was awakened by Mackenzie’s voice “pitched to that high, fretful key,” saying “Wake up, Sergeant! Wake up your men and look after the horses!”²⁰
After breakfast Mackenzie gave the best of the horses to his scouts, cut out a few for his own use, and then ordered the others—more than a thousand—shot. Custer had shot horses on the Washita in 1868, but that was mere expediency, since his column was in grave danger of annihilation. Mackenzie now did it as a military tactic, a way to take away the Indians’ means of survival. It was a gruesome job, and it took time. The infantry roped the crazed horses and led them into firing squads. As more and more horses were killed, they became harder to handle. The last one was not shot until almost three o’clock in the afternoon. The result was a massive pile of dead horses. They rotted at the head of Tule Canyon, then turned to bleached bones that remained there for many years, becoming both a navigational landmark and a grotesque monument marking the end of the horse tribes’ dominion on the plains. Eventually some enterprising person gathered what was left up and sold it for fertilizer. Mackenzie’s slaughter of the Comanche horses also spawned a legend. On certain nights, it is said, a phantom herd can be seen galloping through the canyon, riderless, their spectral manes flying in the wind.
Thus ended the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon. Only four Indians had been killed, but Mackenzie had dealt them a devastating blow. No one knows how many of them were camped in the village, but the number of lodges suggests perhaps a thousand. And these Indians now faced a terrible new reality. They were mostly afoot, without shelter, food, or clothing, facing winter on the high plains where the buffalo herds were being quickly thinned out by the hide men. They had been routed, in large number, from their last important hideout. Most of the Indians who escaped through Blanca Cita Canyon that day straggled back to Fort Sill in the following weeks, thoroughly beaten and never to roam off the reservation again.²¹
- • •
Sheridan’s great campaign was soon over. The hide-and-seek game continued through the winter, with ever fewer Indians as players. A large number of Indians had returned to Fort Sill in the fall. Those who had not were short of food; some were starving to death. In February, Lone Wolf and the last of the Kiowas came in. In March, 825 Southern Cheyennes gave up. Small groups and individuals streamed in continuously. In April the Comanche bands of Shaking Hand, Hears the Sunrise, and Wild Horse surrendered with thirty-five warriors, one hundred forty women and children, and seven hundred horses. They were disarmed, and had their horses and mules taken from them. They were initially put into internment camps west of Fort Sill. Chiefs who had broken treaties or promises were often dealt with harshly. The Kiowa Satanta was sent to a prison in Huntsville, Texas, where he committed suicide by diving headfirst from a second-floor window of the prison hospital. Others were sent by rail to exile in Florida. When the authorities realized how thoroughly broken the horse tribes were, they allowed most of the chiefs to come back. For all of its lack of large-scale drama, Sheridan in his report for 1875 called the Red River War “the most successful of any Indian campaign in this country since its settlement by the whites.”
By the end of April there were only a few bands of southern Plains Indians that had not surrendered, by far the largest of which were Quanah’s Quahadis. As far as the army could tell, the band had completely disappeared after the Battle of Adobe Walls.²² There were four hundred of them, including one hundred able-bodied fighting men. In spite of their numbers, and a large horse herd, they had accomplished the signal feat of completely evading the white man’s incessant patrols. They had done this by quick and agile movement. They had also stayed well south of the other concentrations of Indians in the panhandle, spending most of their time camped southeast of present-day Lubbock, near the towns of Gail and Snyder, just on the eastern side of the caprock. Mackenzie searched for them twice there, acting on intelligence from captured Kiowas. He had found nothing. He had in fact spent a good deal of time looking for Quanah. In his third and last scouting trip in December 1874 he had spent seventeen days and traveled two hundred fifty-five miles, all in the southern part of the Llano Estacado. His men had trudged through deep snow and ice storms from today’s Floydada to Snyder, during which time they had killed exactly three Indians. They did find a fresh trail heading across the high plains to the Mucha-que country, a favorite trading site near today’s Gail. Mackenzie followed. He was so sure that he had Quanah’s band in his sights that he requested that an immediate detachment of troops be sent from Fort Concho to intercept it. Nothing came of that, either. Bogged down in yet another snowstorm, Mackenzie received a message from Sheridan that his war duties were over. He was to report to Fort Sill and assume command of the Comanche-Kiowa and Cheyenne-Arapaho reservations.²³
In a later interview, Quanah confirmed that he had in fact spent the entire fall and winter playing cat and mouse with the federals. “Having several hundred good horses,” he said, “we kept a good watch for the approach of the enemy, and when we would learn that they were coming in our direction we would quickly move. Several of my men, with our families, kept up that kind of tactic all winter. . . . During that time we were almost continuously going, as the soldiers were after us and many times they were almost upon us.”²⁴ They hunted buffalo when they could, and when they could not eat buffalo or horse meat they reverted to the old Comanche ways of the prehorse days in Wyoming, eating nuts, grubs, and rodents. They most likely traded with Comancheros who had slipped through Mackenzie’s blockade. They had a very hard time.
On March 16, 1875, Mackenzie arrived to take command at Fort Sill. By mid-April he was aware that only one large band remained in the wild, and he knew who they were. On April 23 he dispatched a special delegation to try to persuade Quanah to come in peacefully. It consisted of a Dr. Jacob J. Sturm, a self-styled “physician” and translator who had married a Caddo woman, plus three Comanches including the Quahadi chief Wild Horse. They had only a vague idea of where they were going. They headed southwest from Fort Sill, crossed the Red River and traveled along the eastern edge of the caprock. Near the present town of Matador they came upon the small, fifteen-lodge village of the Quahadi chief Black Beard. The emissaries were received cordially, and Black Beard readily accepted Mackenzie’s offer to come in peaceably with his fifty Comanches. The winter had been brutally hard. He said he was tired of war, and told the white men where Quanah’s camp was. It was “two sleeps” distant. On May 1, Sturm and his group found the camp more or less exactly where Mackenzie had thought it was. Sturm wrote:
On our arrival in camp the Indians rode up from every direction to see who we were and finding we were peace messengers they invited us to alight from our horses, which were taken care of by the squaws while we were escorted to a large tent by the men. Here we divided our tobacco, coffee, and sugar with them which pleased them immensely having had none of the luxuries for a long time.²⁵
He spent the next two days in counsel with both Quanah and Isa-tai, who had somehow retained his influence and position in spite of his glaring failure at Adobe Walls. Sturm made an interesting observation about him.
The Medicine Man says he is no chief but admits that he has much influence over his people. . . . He further states that he has not acquired this influence by being a warrior and what influence he has he acquired by kind treatment of his people, never abusing them. He says he has a big heart, loves everybody and every living thing that he never gets mad or strikes even a beast.²⁶
Quanah, unexpectedly, was preaching surrender. He had been foremost among the white-man haters; he had burned hottest for revenge for the death of his father, the capture of his mother and sister, and the death of his nephew and other friends and family. He had demonstrated a willful disregard of personal danger at Adobe Walls, and he had spent the early summer killing white people. He had long despised the Comanches who traveled the white man’s road. He also understood that he was a half-breed, and that his mother had been a white woman. Now he spoke passionately in favor of taking the white man’s road. Parker family legend has it that in order to make his decision, Quanah had gone to a mesa top to meditate. He had begun to pray to the Great Spirit for guidance when he saw a wolf that howled at him and ran off in the direction of Fort Sill. Then saw an eagle, who swooped down at him several times, and flew off to the northeast. He took these as signs that he should surrender.²⁷ His people agreed. Isa-tai left a pictographic note for thirty men of the band who were out on a buffalo hunt, writing it on buffalo skin and sticking it on a pole, and on May 6, 1875, the entire group left for Fort Sill.
They traveled slowly. Their horses, weakened from lack of food and the harsh winter, were unable to do otherwise. The slowness of the travel lent a sort of wistfulness to the journey. There was a sense that they were performing what amounted to the last rites of freedom. The Comanches hunted every day. They killed buffalo and antelope and wild horses and feasted on food cooked in rock-lined pits. They stopped periodically while women dried and packed meat, the men raced horses, and the children chased prairie chickens. They drank the white man’s coffee, loaded with sugar. They danced the old dances. Sturm said that “they make it to be the last Medicine Dance they ever expect to have on these broad plains. They say they will abandon their roving life and try to learn to live as white people do.”²⁸ Strangely, Sturm records no bitterness, no sadness. Perhaps this was simply a failure of imagination. Perhaps the People really had no idea what bean farming or sheep ranching was going to be like, or what it was like to live in a single place in a single dwelling and never move with the spring herds, or what Comanche men would find to do with themselves if there was no hunting or fighting and no way to prove their worth.
At noon on June 2, nearly a month after they left their camp, four hundred seven Quahadis arrived at Signal Station, a few miles west of Fort Sill, and surrendered themselves, their fifteen hundred horses, and their arms to the military authorities of the United States. They were treated well. Unlike the other tribes and bands before them, the warriors were not sequestered, under guard, in a roofless icehouse with a stone floor, where once a day a wagon stacked with raw meat came by, and soldiers threw chunks of it over the walls.²⁹ The women, children, and old men, meanwhile, were taken off to their appointed campground. At the time there were only fifty holdouts remaining. They were all camped on the reservation.
From the moment of Quanah’s arrival, Colonel Mackenzie took an intense interest in him. In spite of his travails with them, Mackenzie admired the Quahadis. When he learned they were coming in, he wrote Sheridan: “I think better of this band than of any other on the reserve. . . . I shall let them down as easily as I can.” He did, in fact. The Quahadis were allowed to keep a large number of their horses, and he made sure that no one in Quanah’s band was confined in the icehouse or guardhouse at Fort Sill.³⁰ There are no records of what happened when the two men first met, or what they said to each other. What is known is that before Quanah even arrived, Mackenzie had found out via messenger the identity of his mother and had written a letter, dated May 19, 1875, to the military quartermaster at Dennison, Texas, inquiring about the whereabouts of Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower. The letter was also published in a Dallas newspaper, and managed to elicit the information that both Quanah’s sister and his mother were dead.³¹ He had not yet met Quanah, but the letter was the beginning of what history records as a remarkable friendship.