Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (38 page)

They stayed there for more than a year, during which time Quanah built the camp into his own power base. Their main activity was horse stealing. “We just stole horses all over Texas,” according to Quanah. They undoubtably killed people, too. With time, some of his young and daring cohorts returned to their main camp, telling tales of riches and adventure, and Quanah’s leadership, returning to the North Concho with their sweethearts or wives, as well as other young men who wanted to ride with Quanah. At the end of the year, Quanah’s band numbered several hundred.
³⁰
They owned a large horse herd.

Meanwhile, Weckeah’s elopement had not stopped gnawing at Eckitoacup, and he finally decided he would mount an expedition to get her back. By now everyone knew where Quanah was. Eckitoacup rode south with a war party and arrived at the renegade camp on the river. It is not clear what he expected to find, but what he and his warriors found themselves confronting was Quanah’s entire band, armed and painted and drawn up for battle. Shocked by the number of warriors, Eckitoacup became alarmed for his own safety. Instead of fighting, he decided to settle: Four leaders from each side met on neutral ground. After much smoking and haggling, a deal was made. Eckitoacup would receive nineteen horses, the pick of Quanah’s herd. In exchange Quanah would be granted the right to return to the tribe. (Quanah observed, after the deal was concluded, that he knew a ranch where he could steal nineteen comparable horses in a few hours.) The deal was sealed with a night of feasting and dancing. Because Quanah’s band had by this time become too large to be left in peace in that part of Texas, he followed Eckitoacup back home the next day, where he found that he enjoyed new status as a fully fledged war chief.
³¹

UNCIVIL WARS

T
HE YEAR QUANAH
became a warrior, 1863, was the bloodiest year in American history, though most of the blood that was shed had nothing at all to do with this ambitious Comanche boy who rode free on the western plains, stealing horses and taking scalps. The agent of death and destruction was the Civil War. That year it was transformed forever from the relatively brief, self-contained, regional conflict most people believed it would be into the malevolent, drawn-out, continent-girding affair that threatened to rip the country permanently apart. Eighteen sixty-three was the year of Chancellorsville and Chickamauga, of Vicksburg and Chattanooga, the year Robert E. Lee marched seventy-five thousand rebel troops clear into Pennsylvania, into the great heartland of the north, where they fought the Union to a grisly fifty-one-thousand-casualty draw at Gettysburg.

The Civil War had very little to do with the western frontier itself. All of its main engagements took place east of the Mississippi River and such action as there was in Texas, Kansas, New Mexico, and the Indian Territory did not involve the free horse tribes. Still, the war managed to tear that frontier apart. It did so not with armies of men and rolling caissons but with simple neglect. Preoccupied with the war, and in any case lacking the money to fight Indians, Union and Confederate governments alike had no choice but to leave the west to its own devices. That meant that, quite suddenly, most of the people who had defended the borderlands in the 1840s and 1850s,
from the Rangers to the Second Cavalry to various state militias, were simply gone. The men who won victories with Ford at Antelope Hills, or Van Dorn at Wichita Village, or Ross at Pease River all departed for eastern battlefields. And with them went the knowledge and will to pursue Comanches into their homelands.

In their place rose the state and territorial militias, a sorry lot of inferior soldiers commanded by substandard officers who were ducking the larger war. They were underequipped as well. They provided their own, often atrocious, weapons. Their lead was in short supply and some of their powder was so poor that it “would not kill a man ten steps from the muzzle.”
¹
They suffered from bad food, alcoholism, epidemics of measles and intestinal ills, and in any event were neither brave enough nor smart enough to win fights with Comanches or Cheyennes or Kiowas. (One regiment, embarking on an Indian pursuit, decided instead to head to another fort and play poker.)

They were preoccupied with other concerns anyway, which included their own miniaturized version of the war. In 1861 the Texas militia moved into Indian Territory, occupied federal forts, and drove the Union troops north into the brand-new state of Kansas. There would be periodic small-scale fighting over the territory for the duration of the war, culminating in the Battle of Honey Springs in 1863, in which three thousand Union troops from Kansas defeated six thousand Texans and Indians. But these events took place well east of the frontier, which remained ignored and undefended.

And this sudden neglect changed everything. Though the bizarrely passive federal policies of the 1850s had opened the way for hundreds of Indian attacks, the decade had in fact closed with a flash of willpower and resolve. Rip Ford’s 1858 expedition was a watershed event with few precedents (including what the only Spanish governor to rein in Comanche terror, the brilliant Don Juan Bautista de Anza, had done in his pursuit of Cuerno Verde onto the plains of eastern Colorado in 1779). And while Sul Ross’s victory at Pease River in 1860 may not have been quite as glorious as most histories suggest, as a measure of the
taibos’
will to defend themselves it, too, was a conspicuous advance. Indeed, it would have seemed in the late 1850s, as it had seemed in the late 1830s and the late 1840s, that Comanche power was fast on the wane, that the end of their ability to raid unchallenged would soon come to an end, that their days off the reservation were sharply numbered. And yet all that was an illusion. Comanche history must be understood that way, in terms of pulses and counterpulses of power. The pulse of
state and federal power in the late 1850s was awesome. Comanches were running for shelter in the fastness of the Llano Estacado. They would soon have been broken. There were not enough of them left for it to be otherwise.

Then the Civil War came, the Texans went off to fight it, and they left their bones in shallow graves all over the South, and the lesson was forgotten again. What is remarkable, in retrospect, is how long it took the Comanches to figure out that border defenses had lapsed, how long it took them to grasp this massive shift in the balance of power. This was partly because both the Union and Confederacy, equally enfeebled in their western zones, were quick to pursue generous new treaties with them. The resulting agreements were versions of the same tired, disingenuous, and ultimately useless promises. But they did delay the inevitable reckoning. The Confederates promised the People gifts and supplies. In exchange the Indians cheerfully agreed to settle on their reservation, learn how to farm, and stop attacking both white and red people, promises they had no intention of keeping. The treaty was signed by the Comanches who lived on the reservation, mainly Penatekas, as well as the chiefs of the wild Comanche bands, including the Nokoni, Yamparika, Kotsoteka, and a remnant of the Tennawish. The Quahadis, magnificently aloof as always, refused to sign anything. The federal government made its own treaty, too, one that simply restated the treaty of 1853, promising the same old annuities and provisions, asking for the same sort of absurd concessions.

The first of the horrors to be unleashed by the demon of neglect had little to do with the white man. These were the Indian-on-Indian wars in the Indian Territory, the land north of the Red River and south of Kansas that would eventually become the state of Oklahoma. Most of the conquered and displaced tribes from the East, South, and Midwest had been relocated there—a process that had begun in the early nineteenth century. In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which forced most tribes to give up all of their lands in the East and Midwest for a supposedly eternal plot of ground in the Indian Territory. By the 1860s the territory had become an intricate patchwork of aboriginal cultures, each with its own designated reserve. The larger reserves had been given to the Five Civilized Tribes (Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Seminole), as well as to the combined Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache tribes, the Cheyennes and Arapahos, and to the Wichitas and their affiliated tribes (Caddos, Anadarkos, Tonkawas, Tawakonis, Keechis, and Delawares). There were smaller areas for Kickapoos, Sac
and Fox, Osages, Pawnees, Pottawotamies and Shawnees, Iowas, Peorias, Quapaws, Modocs, Ottawas, Wyandottes, Senecas, Poncas, and Otos and Missouris. It was, all in all, an astonishing collision of native interests and antagonisms, all jammed together by fiat of Congress on the rolling plains and timberlands north of the Red River.

For many of these tribes, the Civil War was as much of a disaster as it became, eventually, for white farmers in eastern Georgia. The trouble began in 1861, soon after the first shots of the war were fired, when the United States withdrew its troops from Indian Territory.
²
Though there were a few ragtag confederates scattered through the territory, the agrarian tribes were mostly unprotected from the wild horse tribes, who had always hated them for encroaching on their hunting grounds and for what they saw as their fawning accommodation of the white man. With no one to offer the farming tribes even nominal protection, the Comanches unleashed a terrible violence. (These were mostly the wild bands, but Penatekas from the reservation sometimes rode with them.) The Chickasaws were the principal target, though other tribes also fell victim. Comanches raided their farms and settlements just as they raided on the Texas frontier. They rode down upon their foot-bound, house-dwelling, field-tilling victims. Many Chickasaws were driven out of the Indian Territory altogether and into Kansas. Choctaws and Creeks came under Comanche attack, too, as did the Indians of the Wichita Reservation, some of whom had copied the settled, agrarian ways of the civilized tribes with great success. Comanches made short work of their farms, stock, and crops. Whole settlements were butchered, captives taken. It should be noted that the “civilized” Indians were not always easy prey: They were often capable fighters and sometimes got the better of their tormentors.
³

But Comanche raids were just part of the tragedy. There were also partisan wars between the entrenched tribes. There were “Confederate” Indians and “Union” Indians. Many members of the Five Civilized Tribes were slaveholders, which both angered Union Indians and caused deep rifts within their own ranks. The result was a series of massacres and retaliations, most of which are lost to history. What is known about them suggests that they were brutal and widespread. Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole territories became the scenes of battles between loyalists on both sides. Houses and farms were burned, seedstock and farming tools destroyed or stolen. Large segments of those tribes ended the war hungry and destitute, dependent once again upon
the government for their livelihood.
⁴
In 1862, one hundred Tonkawas were killed in a single attack, part of a wave of such incidents that nearly resulted in their extermination.
⁵
This was ostensibly because of their cannibalism, which the other tribes deplored, but it was more likely because they had long served the Texans as scouts in their anti-Indian expeditions.
⁶
The Civil War offered many such opportunities for settling scores.

As in the larger war, there were massive displacements of human beings. In late 1861 a large body of “loyal” Creeks and other tribes under the command of Creek chief Opothle Yahola were attacked repeatedly in the last week of December by a combination of Confederate tribes and Texas cavalry. The terrified Union Indians dropped everything and fled northward. Large numbers of them froze in the bitter cold, and many of their bodies were eaten by wolves. Babies were born naked on the snow and soon died of exposure.
⁷
According to one report, 700 Creeks and others were either killed in the attacks or froze to death.
⁸
Once in Kansas, they gathered in a refugee camp where things were scarcely better. Families slept on the frozen ground with only scraps of cloth—handkerchiefs, aprons, and such—stretched on saplings as protection against the plains blizzards. The initial composition of that camp reveals much about what the Civil War did to the Indian territory. It contained 3,168 Creeks, 53 Creek slaves, 38 “free Creek negroes,” 777 Seminoles, 136 Quapaws, 50 Cherokees, 31 Chickasaws, and a few Kickapoos. By April the camp held 7,600 refugees that included Kichais, Hainais, Biloxis, and Caddos, all of them utterly dispossessed of everything they once owned.
⁹