Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (42 page)

When I was in Washington the Great Father told me that all the Comanche land was ours and that no one should hinder us in living upon it. So, why do you ask us to leave the rivers and the sun and the wind and live in houses? Do not ask us to give up the buffalo for the sheep. The young men have heard talk of this, and it has made them sad and angry. Do not speak of it more. I love to carry out the talk I get from the Great Father. When I get goods and presents I and my people feel glad, since it shows that he holds us in his eye.

If the Texans had kept out of my country, there might have been peace. But that which you now say we must live in, is too small. The Texans have taken away the places where the grass grew the thickest and the timber was best. Had we kept that, we might have done the things you ask. But it is too late. The whites have the country which we loved, and we wish only to wander on the prairie til we die.

It was even too late for that, as the Indians knew better than anyone. No free Indians were going to be allowed to wander anywhere. Ten Bears’s soaring rhetoric was elegiac, at best. He did not really think the whites were going to offer him anything better than they already had. Though Medicine Lodge was ostensibly a bargaining session, in fact there was no bargaining at all. The whites were issuing a thinly disguised ultimatum. General Sherman, who had participated in the conference as a peace commissioner but actually advocated military operations against delinquent tribes, offered them no comfort or consolation. It was clear to him, though perhaps not yet to the vast herd of public-policy-makers in Washington, that the old solutions no longer applied. The Indians could not be driven away or removed to the West. That had been the old solution, the one employed with the Creeks, Seminoles, Delawares, Iroquois, and other eastern tribes. The Plains Indians resided in the heart of the last frontier, and their land was not simply wanted as a pass-through for trains and wagons heading west. Comancheria itself was coveted by white men. Sherman told the Indians they would have to give up their old ways and learn to become farmers. And there was nothing, they were told bluntly by the man who had overseen carnage on a scale that these Indians could not possibly comprehend, they could do about it. “You can no more stop this than you can stop the sun or the moon,” he said. “You must submit and do the best you can.”
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And so they did, signing what amounted to a gigantic abstraction that was based on notions of property, on cartography and westward migration, and on the larger idea of Manifest Destiny, none of which they would ever completely comprehend. The white man would drag his treaty back to the
Great Father where it would sit among the forests of granite and marble and somehow work its terrible invisible magic. The Indians were not in any way happy about what they were being asked to do. There was nothing good about it, nothing but destruction and degradation on their end, though to most of them it seemed far better to mollify the white man yet again with a treaty (especially one that came with gifts attached) than to refuse and thus unleash warmongers like Sherman. On October 21, 1867, chiefs from all of the tribes put their marks on the treaty, which of course they could not read.
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They included headmen from the Yamparika (Ten Bears, Painted Lips, Hears a Wolf, Little Horn, Dog Fat, and Iron Mountain), the Nokonis (Horse Back, Gap in the Woods) and Penatekas (Silver Brooch, Standing Feather).
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As much as a third of the tribe was not represented at the council. Mostly they were Kotsotekas and Quahadis, the two most remote bands who tended to camp together in the Llano Estacado. The Kotsotekas had signed a treaty in 1865, though they never had abided by it. The Quahadis had never signed anything, and never would. That did not matter to the U.S. peace commission: The entire tribe was presumed to have signed the agreement, and they would all be held to it. The band structure of the Comanches no longer mattered to anyone.

Among the unreconstructed elements of the Quahadis who were present at Medicine Lodge was eighteen-year-old Quanah. Why he should have been there is unknown. Quanah’s own description sounds quite casual. He had been on the warpath against the Navajo, he said. While staying at a Cheyenne village, he was told that white soldiers were coming to a great powwow and bringing beeves, sugar, and coffee. “I went and heard it,” Quanah said later. “There were many soldiers there. The council was an unusual one, a great many rows. The soldier chief said ‘Here are two propositions. You can live on the Arkansas and fight or move down to the Wichita Mountains and I will help you. But you must remember one thing and hold fast to it and that is you must stop going on the warpath. Which one will you choose?’ All the chiefs decided to move down here [to the reservation].”
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For anyone who believed that the Indians were sincere in signing the Medicine Lodge treaty, its implications would have seemed breathtaking. The treaty required nothing less than that the great and unrivaled powers of the middle and southern plains move immediately and en masse
to reservations and take up modest new lives, accepting agencies, schools and farms, gov
ernment teachers, blacksmiths, carpenters, and agricultural instructors, all of which they had said specifically and repeatedly that they did not want.
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They were allowed to leave the reservation to hunt, south of the Arkansas. But the treaty really meant that they would have to cease fighting and stop following the buffalo, which in turn meant that they would have to cease being Plains Indians. They would have to reorder their entire social structure around a set of values and principles that were still largely unimaginable to them. The Comanches and Kiowas were to share a 2.9-million-acre reservation in what is now southwestern Oklahoma, north and east of the Red River and its north fork, south of the Washita, and west of the 98th meridian. This was actually very good land, huntable and arable and with decent water sources, and it was in traditional Comanche territory and included Medicine Bluffs and other sacred sites. But it was a tiny fraction of Comancheria, which at its peak held nearly
200 million acres.
Nor did it include by far the richest of the old hunting grounds, the Texas bison plains. The Cheyennes and Arapahos, meanwhile—only their southern bands—agreed to live on a reservation immediately to the north of the Comanche reservation.

Seen from the distance of a century and a half, the Medicine Lodge treaty can seem like a cynical document. But it did not at the time appear that way to lawmakers in the East, or to the members of the peace commission who signed it. Their efforts had inspired great hope that this would offer a final solution to the Indian problem on the southern plains. This belief was held despite the Indians’ stern protestations and the deep skepticism of the army in the West. After all, the eastern Indians had made the transition to farming life. The civilized tribes, after the horrendous attrition of the Trail of Tears, had managed to change. So could the Plains Indians. To many people the treaty seemed a fair and reasonable solution to an old and intractable problem.

They were mistaken. Instead, Medicine Lodge provided the framework for the last great betrayal of the Indians by a government that had betrayed and lied to Native American tribes more times than anyone could possibly count. The agent of the betrayal was the Office of Indian Affairs, one of the most corrupt, venal, and incompetent government agencies in American history. The new era began with the bizarre decision by J. H. Leavenworth, the appointed agent for the Comanches and Kiowas and a loud proponent of peace, to locate his agency at Fort Cobb on the Washita River, which was on the reservation of the Wichitas and affiliated bands, well north of the Comanche-Kiowa lands. Leavenworth’s ill-considered decision introduced
warlike, mounted Comanches into direct proximity with Indians who farmed and lived in houses. As the Civil War years had shown with cruel clarity, this was a very bad idea.

The error was compounded when several thousand Kiowas and Comanches actually showed up at the agency in the winter of 1867–68, precisely what Leavenworth and his bosses wanted. But for some reason they had failed to anticipate that these Indians would need food. Shockingly, Medicine Lodge had not provided for Indian rations, and so the government had nothing to give them. Nor did it have any of the promised annuity goods (and would not until Congress ratified the treaty in the summer of 1868). Leavenworth himself was not to blame, but collectively the white men had made an unforgivable blunder, which meant a crushing failure of the very first post-treaty test of friendship and sincerity.

The Indians were disgusted, and furious. They believed the white men had lied to them. They were also hungry, because it was winter and they had counted on the government food to help them get through the hard season. Leavenworth tried desperately to compensate, issuing all the goods in his possession, using his breeding cattle for food, and even buying goods with unauthorized credit. But those moves were not sufficient to feed the miserable and restive Comanches. So they began to solve their problem the old way: by raiding the Wichitas and other nearby tribes. They stole cattle, horses, and mules, and if anyone got in their way he was killed and scalped. At one point the raids got so bad that the sedentary tribes were forced to stop farming altogether so they could guard their horses, mules, and cattle.

The food crisis was made worse by yet another remarkably shortsighted decision: The Office of Indian Affairs, in its ardor for peace and in its fundamental belief that these Indians were always gentle unless provoked by white men, had prohibited the stationing of troops at the agency. This was yet another catastrophic mistake, which not only gave the Comanches a free hand to ravage the Indian country, but also gave them a secure base from which to conduct their ever more frequent raids into Texas.

Leavenworth, who had strongly supported the peace plan, was soon complaining bitterly. “I recommend that [the Kiowas’] annuities, as well as the Comanches, be stopped, and all confiscated for the benefit of the orphans they have made. The guilty are demanded—according to our treaties—for punishment. And if not delivered up, then let them be turned over to the military . . . to make short sharp work with them.”
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Thus disabused of his
old idealism, Leavenworth now had to contend with a thousand surly, disappointed Comanches who were back to their old habits of raiding and stealing and committing atrocities. Unable to bear the strain, he simply walked off his job in the spring of 1868. From May to October, one of the most critical times in the history of relations between Plains Indians and the U.S. government, there was no federal authority at all in the Comanche-Kiowa reservation. Traders and other white men had fled in fear of their lives. The property custodian, the only white person who remained at the agency, could do nothing but keep track of the continuing raids into Texas and count the number of scalps the raiders brought back.
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It was pure chaos, pure anarchy.

When the goods finally did arrive, they were of abysmal quality. And now the Indians confronted yet another aspect of the Indian office: its corruption. The clothing the Indians had been promised was shoddy and threadbare. The pants all came in one size: large enough to fit a two-hundred-pound man. Few Comanches weighed that much. The hats they received looked like those worn by the Pilgrims. Most of the Comanches ripped the clothes up and used them for other purposes. The food was bad, too. Instead of fresh meat—which had always been their diet—they got rancid bacon or salt pork. They were given a lot of cornmeal, which they detested and fed to their horses.

None of these failures could be blamed on the tangled government bureaucracy. They were the product of the endemic corruption and graft for which the Indian office had justly become infamous by the 1860s. The Indian peace commission of 1867 had been so scandalized by what they found out in the various agencies that they wrote:

The records are abundant to show that agents have pocketed the funds appropriated by the government and driven the Indian to starvation. It cannot be doubted that Indian wars have originated from this cause. . . . For a long time these officers have been selected from partisan ranks, not so much on account of honesty and qualification as for devotion to party interests and their willingness to apply the money of the Indian to promote the selfish schemes of local politicians.
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As time went by, the agents proved stupid as well as corrupt. Ironically, one commodity they were actually proficient at delivering to Comanches and Kiowas was weapons. The Indians had made an eloquent plea for better rifles; without them they could not hunt effectively, they argued, and thus would be more dependent on the government. While this argument
had some merit, it was also quite as obviously true that Comanches were attacking Texas homesteads and Wichita farms. Amazingly, the Indian office persuaded the Department of the Interior, in violation of laws against arming Indians, to deliver several tons of arms and ammunition to plains tribes, including Comanches. And these weapons were not shoddy at all. In a day when the standard army issue weapon was still the single-shot rife, the Indian weapons included repeating Spencer and Henry rifles and carbines.
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Meanwhile, the heart of the Medicine Lodge treaty—the plan to turn Comanches and other horse tribes from nomadic hunter-gatherers into house-dwelling farmers—was also proving almost completely futile. A few Penatekas, long in captivity, tried to go along with the idea. But in general Comanche men simply refused to have anything to do with farming. When Leavenworth hired a white farmer in the spring of 1868 to demonstrate the planting of seeds, Comanches swooped down and plundered the fields before the crop was ripe. They ate green watermelons, which made them violently ill. The Indians only wanted beef, and eventually forced the agent to spend most of the budget on it, leaving little or nothing available to buy seed and farming tools.