A stack of buffalo skulls
PA R K E R C O U N T Y T O D AY
at Blanco Canyon on the morning of October 9, 1871,
the troopers lost a number of horses when Quanah and
his followers raided the cavalry campsite,” the Handbook
of Texas Online reads. “Afterwards, the Indians simply
disappeared onto the plains, only to reappear and attack
again.”
In Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and
the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, Gwynne wrote:
“At around midnight, the regiment was awakened by a
succession of unearthly, high-pitched yells. Those were
followed by shots and more yells, and suddenly the camp
was alive with Comanches riding at full gallop. Exactly
what the Indians were doing was soon apparent: Mingled
with the screams and gunshots and general mayhem of
the camp was another sound, only barely audible at first,
then rising quickly to something like rolling thunder. The
men quickly realized, to their horror, that it was the sound
of stampeding horses. Their horses. Amid shouts of ‘every
man to his lariat!’ six hundred panicked horses tore loose
through the camp, rearing, jumping, and plunging at full
speed. Lariats snapped with the sound of pistol shots;
iron picket pins that a few minutes before had been used
to secure the horses now whirled and snapped about
their necks like airborne sabres. Men tried to grab them
and were thrown to the ground and dragged among the
horses, their hands lacerated and bleeding.”
NOVEMBER 2015
from the 1830s to Dec. 18, 1860, when he was killed on
the Pease River in a battle with Capt. Lawrence Sullivan
Ross.” Almost 40 years later Quanah said it was not his
father who troopers killed that winter along the Pease but
another chief. But many historians cite a “preponderance
of evidence” that affirms Peta Nocona died that day.
“Ross’s Mexican interpreter, for instance, who said
Nocona had taken him as a slave when he was a child,
identified the chief. Cynthia Ann Parker wept over the
dead man and called him Nocona. And after the battle at
the Pease, which was itself big news, no one ever heard
anything more about Peta Nocona until Quanah’s disclaimer almost four decades later.” — Handbook of Texas
Online.
What of their two sons? Quanah would later tell cattleman Charles Goodnight that he and his brother Pecos had
simply trotted off from the scene of the battle. (Quanah
would have been about 10.) Goodnight believed him because as a scout he had found the trail of two horses trott ing away from the fray until a mile distant; then the riders
whipped their horses into a dead run for a large Indian
camp. Goodnight said he and a handful of men trailed the
horses some 50 miles to the encampment of over 1,000
Comanche. Having his wits about him, he abandoned the
pursuit.
With his father dead and his mother taken by the
whites, Quanah found himself a boy without a family. He
had little choice but to join the Quahadi Comanches of
the Llano Estacado or Staked Plains of Northwest Texas.
The band became fugitives on the plains where they
continued to hunt buffalo and endeavored to stay just out
of reach of the U.S. Army. Quanah Parker grew to be a
respected warrior and leader among the Quahadis, who
refused to sign the 1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty Council,
which established in Indian Territory a reservation for the
Comanches, Kiowas and Kiowa Apaches. For several years
they lived the nomadic life of the Plains Indian in open
defiance of the U.S. Government and its “big stick” — the
Army.
“Unlike almost all the other tribal bands on the plains,
the Quahadis had always shunned contact with Anglos,”
wrote S.C. Gwynne in Last Days of the Comanches, a
May 2010 article in Texas Monthly. “They would not even
trade with them, as a general principle, preferring to use
the mobile traders known as Comancheros as middlemen. For this reason they had largely avoided the cholera
plagues of 1816 and 1849 that had ravaged western tribes
and had destroyed fully half of the Comanches. Unlike
almost every other Indian band in North America, they
never signed a treaty. The Quahadis were the hardest,
fiercest, least-yielding component of a tribe that had long
had the reputation as the most violent and warlike on the
continent; if they ran low on water, they were known to
drink the contents of a dead horse’s stomach, something
the toughest Texas Ranger would not do.”
Efforts by Colonel Mackenzie’s Fourth United States
Cavalry to locate and subjugate the Quahadas in 1871 and
1872 ended in failure. When the bluecoats occasionally
did get close to the Indians, calamity followed.
“Not only was the army unable to find the Indians but,
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