our history: COMANCHE WAR
disappeared
the
Part 7
Passionate Resistance to
Peyote Pow Wows
Evasive Chief Quanah Parker leads his people to
reservation life and a new spirituality.
BY MEL W RHODES
T
PA R K E R C O U N T Y T O D AY
This is Part 7 of a series.
This is continued from the January
2016 issue of Parker County Today.
For the previous parts, please visit
parkercountytoday.com
MARCH 2016
he story of westward expansion
in the United States is a tale of
sprawling ambition, of displacement
and subjugation. Military actions
mounted to clear frontier areas for Anglo
settlement maddened Native American
tribes such as the Comanche, who had
themselves displaced other tribes. A
relentless campaign in Texas in 1874-75
called the Red River War decimated the
southern buffalo herd the Plains Indians
depended on and finally broke the back
of Native American resistance in the Texas
Panhandle, subduing the fierce Comanche
and the other Southern Plains tribes like the
Kiowa and Cheyenne.
According to the Handbook of Texas
Online: “[The war was] … a concerted fivepronged attack launched in the Panhandle
for the purpose of driving all Indians to the
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