A
chief refused to offer resistance or
strike back at his assailant. Nothing
Quanah would do would provoke
Lone Wolf to fight. Consequently, the
Comanches won their argument.”
This only deepened the ranchers’
regard for the chief. “In return
for Quanah’s loyalty, and out of
friendship for him, the ranchers made
every effort to make the Comanche
chief comfortable,” wrote Neeley.
“In the mid-1880s, Burk Burnett built
him a house… .” The Star House,
Quanah’s two-story, eight-bedroom
home, having stood vacant for nearly
60 years, last year made the New
York Times. Heavy rains caused
damage to the already-dilapidated
house with the big stars on the roof.
The stars are said to have symbolized
the chief’s status as an equal of
generals.
Quanah influenced his people
Mary Couts Burnette
and thereby history in many practical
matters.
“… He called on his followers to
construct houses of the white man’s
design and to plant crops. In general,
then, Parker was an assimilationist,
an advocate of cooperation with
whites and, in many cases, of
cultural transformation. Along with
his support for ranching, education,
and agriculture, he served as a judge
on the tribal court, an innovation
J.R. Couts
based on county tribunals; negotiated
business agreements with white
investors; and fought attempts to roll
back the changes instituted under his
direction. Here, his influence was
most keenly felt in his successful
attempt to prevent the spread of the
ghost dance among his people. He
also approved the establishment of
a Comanche police force, which
he believed would help the Indians
to manage their own affairs.” —
Handbook of Texas Online.
Through shrewd investments
and an innovative mindset, Quanah
may well have been the wealthiest
Native American in the country at
the time, and certainly one of the
better known. Magazine reporters
queued up to interview the chief on
everything from Comanche culture
to political policy and current social
issues. Celebrity suited him and he
reportedly enjoyed his influence
immensely.
T hough Quanah urged his
people to embrace white ways,
he did not suggest his followers
repudiate or abandon their cultural
heritage. He never kowtowed to the
whites. Finding himself in a strongly
“Christian” environment, he often
felt pressure to conform to an alien
culture. However, he refused the
concept of monogamy and ignored
other conventions of the time.
“[He] maintained a twenty-tworoom house for his seven wives
and numerous children. He refused
to cut his long braids. He rejected
[traditional] Christianity, even though
Continued on page 18
AUGUST 2016 PA R K E R C O U N T Y T O D AY
s chief of the Comanches,
Quanah entered into an
agreement that allowed Burnett to
lease 300,000 acres of Comanche
and Kiowa land in Indian Territory
for just six and a half cents an acre.
(As an interesting aside, Burk Burnett
in 1892 married Mary Couts of
Weatherford, daughter of J.R. Couts,
an influential banker with a penchant
for law and order on the rough and
tumble frontier of North Texas.)
Burnett’s son T.L. “Tom” Burnett
also became fast friends with Quanah
and his family. Born in 1871 on
the family ranch in Denton County,
Texas, Tom was the chief’s junior by
some 26 years. Like his father, he was
a cattleman through and through.
According to the Handbook of Texas
Online: “His first love was the cattle
business, and at age sixteen he was
sent as a cowhand to help look after
his father’s herds in the Big Pasture,
the vast acreage in Indian Territory
that the Burnetts, Waggoners, and
other area ranchers had leased from
the Fort Sill Indian Agency.”
According to Neeley, writing in
The Last Comanche Chief, Quanah’s
friendship with the younger Burnett,
“helped to bind the relationship
between the cattlemen and the
Indians.”
These close relations with various
ranchers constituted an odd alliance.
In a perhaps unprecedented variation
on the “Cowboys and Indians”
theme, the land leases made allies of
the Comanche and the ranchers who
both despised the settlers flooding
onto reservation/leased land.
At times there arose bitter
disagreements between Quanah
and Kiowa chiefs who weren’t so
keen on his land-lease strategy. An
example of such trouble is a bit
of reservation diplomacy between
Quanah and Kiowa Chief Lone Wolf
that reportedly occurred sometime
between 1885 and 1890. The
Oklahoma newspaper the Hobart
Democrat-Chief published the
following Aug. 4, 1925:
“Quanah Parker started the
fight by slapping Lone Wolf, but the
latter did not move. Then Quanah
hit Lone Wolf over the head with
a six-shooter, but still the Kiowa
15