our history: THE PARKER FAMILY
disappeared
the
Part 5
Quanah, the
Quahadis and
the Big Fifties
The son of a white woman
and a fierce warrior
become the last
Comanche chief, and the
best hope for his people
STORY & PHOTOS BY MEL W RHODES
NOVEMBER 2015
PA R K E R C O U N T Y T O D AY
I
t had been a particularly harsh winter on the
Southern Plains, and their undernourished ponies
did well to put one hoof in front of another. Motivated not by a sense of urgency but of resignation,
the Quahadi Comanches journeyed slowly toward
the inevitability of reservation life at Fort Sill (present Southwest Oklahoma), toward an uncertain future somewhere along the White Man’s Road. Once
the masters of all they surveyed, the Lords of the
Plains were at long last beaten, ground down by the
gristmill of Col. Ranald Slidell Mackenzie’s bluecoat army and the Sharps rifle, which The People
said “could shoot today and kill tomorrow.” And
there was the white man’s systematic decimation of
the great southern buffalo herds. Between 1868 and
1881, the bones of some 31 million buffalos were
used as fertilizer. Many were not so much hunted as
exterminated, a sad, albeit, brilliant piece of tactical
Cynthia Ann Parker
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