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he brokered the best deal he could for his people, that
he made the best of a raw deal. His relationship with
President Theodore Roosevelt helped.
According to biographer Neeley, “Roosevelt’s hunt
in the Big Pasture served to familiarize the President
with the Indian’s problem. Accordingly, Roosevelt,
after receiving a telegram from Quanah, vetoed the bill
authorizing the opening of the Big Pasture for settlement
because there were no provisions made for allotting land
to Indian children. Congress amended the bill, and the
President signed it…. The new arrangement allowed them
[the Indians] to keep 480,000 acres of land and secured
$500,000 for the land the United States was taking away
from them… .”
Quanah continued to run his ranching operation
north of present-day Cache, Okla., located some four
miles south of the Wichita Mountains, and remained
influential with his people. He rode in parades and made
appearances and speeches, hunted with the President
and his rancher friends, invested in railroads. Quanah
flourished.
In his last major speech, ironically enough made
before the once hated Tejanos at the 1910 Dallas State
AUGUST 2016 PA R K E R C O U N T Y T O D AY
Charles Goodnight
his son, White Parker, was a Methodist minister.” —
Handbook of Texas Online
In protecting his people and reservation lands,
Quanah Parker was both artful and assertive, determined
to move forward while resisting the whites’ everincreasing land lust that had been the signature engine
of white expansion; but by 1901 the feverish impulse
to settle Indian lands won out. Voting to break up the
Kiowa-Comanche reservation, the federal government
allowed the land to be carved in to individual holdings
for white settlement. It should not have surprised the
Indians, as the flood of whites onto reservation lands
began April 22, 1899, with the Oklahoma Land Rush
when thousands of settlers (Boomers) charged the borders
of Indian Territory vying for cheap land — land whites
formerly regarded as inferior.
According to www.history.com, “Initially considered
unsuitable for white colonization, Indian Territory was
thought to be an ideal place to relocate Native Americans
who were removed from their traditional lands to make
way for white settlement.”
Advances in farming and ranching techniques had
convinced would-be settlers that Indian Territory might
be valuable after all. They wanted it and pressured the
government to give it to them.
Quanah “could no more have prevented the opening
of the reservation than he could have stopped a speeding
locomotive,” wrote Neeley. The reservation days were
coming to an end — another inevitable end for the
Comanche. By 1905, almost all Indian lands were owned
by white Americans, and two short years later on Nov.
16, 1907, Oklahoma entered the Union as its 46th state.
But Qua nah Parker resisted to the last, making sure
18
Quanah Parker, Sam Burk Burnett
Fair, Quanah appealed to the crowd asking that his
mother Cynthia Ann Parker’s remains be returned from
East Texas to her home in the Red River Country. A
couple of months later he reburied her remains in Post
Oak Mission Cemetery near Cache. At the funeral he
said:
“Forty years ago my mother died. She captured by
Comanches, nine years old. Love Indian and wild life
so well no want to go back to white folks. All the same
people anyway, God say. I love my mother. I like my
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