LUBBOCK, Texas (AP) – Line by line, arrow by arrow, the lifetime of Quanah Parker is being pieced together by historians of the Texas Plains Trail Region.
From the shadowy, undocumented time around the 1870s when he rode across the staked plains as a leader of Comanche tribesmen, Parker – half Anglo, half Native American – was a force to be reckoned with.
Anglos sometimes paid with their lives when the force was encountered, and Comanches fell also in the friction of a hit-and-run war that produced outrageous suffering for both sides.
Parker and his mounted warriors so intimately knew the South Plains and Panhandle region, they were able to attack suddenly, then fade into the prairie like ghosts.
Now, cities across a 52-county area are looking for evidence showing Quanah Parker and his Comanches once visited their neighborhoods.
Historian Tai Kreidler of the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library at Texas Tech, describes how the research is recovering bits and pieces of the mosaic that was Parker’s life.
“The grassroots aspect of this project continues as each county and city that applied for an arrow had to research and provide documentation of a Comanche or Quanah Parker connection,” he said.
The arrow, one of gigantic dimensions designed by Charles Smith of the New Home area, can be planted as a marker in a town along the Texas Plains Trail if the Comanche chief came that way.
“The Southwest Collection and Randy Vance of Reference Services assists cities and counties with this process by providing reference source assistance to any of these groups needing background information,” Kreidler said.
Vance is willing to help:
“We have created a Comanche finding aid for the journals we have here in the Southwest Collection. They can come here, or for some who are further away and know of articles or photographs, we can photocopy that material and send it to them.”
An unexpected treasure has been discovered in the work:
“What has been a really amazing part of the process is that each county has emerged with their own folklore and history surrounding the Comanche or Quanah presence,” Kreidler said.
According to Smith, the 21-foot arrow is made of 4-inch diameter pipe, then painted in Comanche colors.
“We put 20 inches into the ground, so about 19 feet is above ground,” he said.
Feathers are forged from quarter-inch steel rods.
Research consultant Holle Humphries said the counties in the region have a particular identity: “We realized what all of our counties shared in common was this past history of having had a common Comanche presence prior to the arrival of white settlers.”
She said, “The Texas Panhandle was the last area where Native Americans lived free and unrestricted – to roam as they had always roamed in nomadic fashion.”
She alludes also to a poetic imagery of the marker arrow first envisioned by Gid Moore of New Home, and then discovered while she and Dolores Mosser were working on the Plains Trail Region together. Moore had commissioned Smith to make an arrow for his business reminiscent of a Longfellow poem titled “The Arrow and the Song.”
Humphries said, “Right at the top of it, the fletching (“feather”) vibrates in the wind and it sings. So, it’s the arrow and the song.”
Mosser, a board member of the Texas Plains Trail Region, said the project initially was designed to provide a kind of cultural trail across the 52 counties that could attract travelers to the region and encourage economic development.
But along the way, the search for new arrow locations became an unforeseen learning experience.
“There is not a place you go that you don’t learn something special: They have Quanah Parker peyote robes at the museum in Tulia; they have Quanah Parker moccasins in the little museum that is in the old courthouse of old Tascosa at Boys Ranch; you can go by Quanah Parker’s birthplace at Cedar Lake.”
Marisue Potts of Matador, the first town to receive one of the arrows, said, “Quanah Parker, the man, left not only his tracks in Motley County, but imprinted his charisma and diplomacy upon the many friends he made among the ranchers and townspeople.”
She is a writer, chairwoman of the Motley County Historical Committee and vice president of the West Texas Historical Association.
“People who notice the arrow are curious and since there is no signage yet, they stop and ask questions about its significance. That gives the local historians a chance to relate the colorful history of the Comanche camping at Roaring Springs, Dutchman Creek and Ballard Creek near the historic Motley County Jail. In the works are documentary short films to relate that history to visitors when the jail restoration is complete,” she said.
Parker, like West Point graduate Ranald Mackenzie, apparently found his element in war, and was able to hold the Panhandle territory for a time against even the United States Fourth Cavalry.
When Col. Mackenzie was unsuccessful in tracking and subduing the Indians in 1871 and 1872, Parker boldly raided the cavalry campsite at Blanco Canyon on the morning of Oct. 9, 1871, taking a number of horses, according to research done by Brian C. Hosmer, writing for the Texas State Historical Association’s Handbook of Texas.
“Afterward, the Indians seemingly disappeared onto the plains, only to reappear and attack again. Mackenzie gave up the search in mid-1872,” Hosmer wrote.
But Mackenzie successfully defeated Kiowas, Cheyennes and some Comanches under another chief in Palo Duro Canyon in late 1874, and essentially finished the wars by destroying the Indians’ horses and food supplies.
Within a year, Parker and his warriors, under continuing pressure from the U.S. Army and suffering from hunger, surrendered and moved to the Kiowa-Comanche reservation in southwestern Oklahoma, according to Hosmer.
But the depths of Parker could be seen more in defeat than in victory. On the reservation lands, he began raising cattle and encouraging his people to learn both the yoke and blessings of civilization. He also was learning to greet other cattlemen of the time – and presidents.
Mosser said, “For me personally in all of this, was learning about Quanah Parker as a cattleman, a statesman, the politician type – he was hobnobbing with presidents. I think it was Theodore Roosevelt who came and hunted with him.”
She added, “The statesman side of this Native American – just in a very short time he went from battling buffalo soldiers and following buffalo herds to being in an inaugural parade.”
Humphries said, “Right here – in Spur, Texas – in their Dickens County Museum, they have the war bonnet that Quanah Parker wore in Teddy Roosevelt’s 1905 inaugural parade.”
Hanaba Munn Welch, who set up the web site www.quanahparkertrail.com for the Texas Plains Trail Region to make some of the connections to Quanah Parker available to the public, said he was a skilled politician who looked out for the members of his tribe as best he could.
“Some Comanches faulted him for giving in too much, but I think he was doing what he thought was best.”
She said of her research, “We have him captured in a black and white silent movie, riding a horse, and driving up to the bank in Cache, Okla., in his stage coach and chasing the bad guys as part of a posse. It was the early 1900s, and Quanah had been killing white people back in the 1870s, maybe 30 years before.”
Mosser said Parker likely became the wealthiest Native American of the time because of his cattle operations.
Parker apparently didn’t completely adopt civilization’s ways: He declined to give up his seven wives and the 22-room house they lived in.
In February 1911, he became ill while visiting a Cheyenne Reservation, and returned to his home, where he died.
He was buried at the Post Oak Mission Cemetery beside his mother, Cynthia Ann Parker. Later, in an expansion of a missile base, they were reburied at Lawton, Okla., in a section of the Fort Sill Post Cemetery called Chief’s Knoll.
When this region’s descendants – both settlers and Native Americans – look back across time, they can see the reality of the years:
Then it was a time of war, now a time of peace.