Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (48 page)

The winter of 1873–74 had been a hard one for the People, many of whom were now shifting restlessly between the agency lands and the camps of the wild Comanches in west Texas. Those who stayed on the reservation were cruelly deceived. There was little game there and no buffalo at all. As before, they were forced to live on the white man’s rations. As before, much of this promised food simply never arrived and what was given to them was often of shockingly inferior quality. Facing starvation, the Comanches were forced to kill their own horses and mules for food.
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These Indians were now victimized by an entirely new phenomenon: organized gangs of white horse thieves, often dressed up as Indians, who preyed with impunity on the Comanche and Kiowa herds. They took the animals to Kansas and sold them. No one pursued them, no one prosecuted them.
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Cheating the Indians was always a good business. And while that was happening white whiskey peddlers moved freely inside the reservation, illegally selling diluted rotgut in exchange for buffalo robes. It amounted to robbery; the liquor cost little to make, while selling robes was virtually the only way many Indians could make money. Whiskey was becoming a serious problem. Many of the Indians became quickly addicted, and thus desperate to trade anything to get it.

For those Comanches who still raided the borderlands, the winter of
1873–74 was even worse. Mackenzie kept patrols in the field at all times, and those patrols began to have a devastating effect on small raiding parties. In December a group of twenty-one Comanches and nine Kiowas rode south through Texas and crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico. It was a good, old-fashioned raid, and must have warmed their hearts. They killed and took captives and stole horses and suffered no casualties. Then they turned for home, and their luck ran out. At Kickapoo Springs (near present-day San Angelo), they and their string of one hundred fifty horses were intercepted by Lieutenant Charles Hudson and forty-one troopers from Mackenzie’s Fourth Cavalry. A hot, ten-minute fight ensued in which nine Comanches were killed and Hudson suffered only one man wounded. The Comanches also lost seventy horses. A few weeks later a Tenth Cavalry patrol under Lt. Col. George Buell engaged a Comanche raiding party near the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos River, killing eleven. Two weeks later, another raiding party was attacked and another ten Indians killed.
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Though the absolute numbers were small, in the desperate, waning years of Comancheria, these were major disasters. The People took the news hard, as did the Kiowas. Kiowa chief Lone Wolf lost his son and his nephew in the fight with Hudson. In his grief, Lone Wolf cut off his hair, killed his horses, and burned his wagon, lodge, and buffalo robes and vowed revenge.
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He might have been gratified to know that Lieutenant Hudson died that winter, too, killed accidentally by his roommate, who was cleaning a gun. Quanah, who also lost a nephew to Buell’s men, would have a far more radical reaction, one that would eventually affect the fate of all Plains Indians.

All of this was terrible news for the People. They went into deep mourning for their lost ones and also, perhaps, for their own lost world. Then, when it did not seem as if things could get any worse, the buffalo hunters arrived in Adobe Walls and began to turn the panhandle into a stinking graveyard. These were frightening times, and there is no reason to believe that the last of the Comanches, defiant on the high plains, did not understand their historical position. They were almost alone now. Most of the Arapahos had given up; they had gone in. The Cheyennes were confused and leaderless. (These were the southern bands of those two tribes.) The Kiowas were riven by political quarrels, deeply split between the idea of surrendering and fighting to the end. There was no one else living outside the territories anymore, not on the south plains. Just a few thousand Comanches who were watching their old world die and losing their identities in the process.

Just at this point, when it seemed that all hope would soon be lost, there arose from the Comanche tribe a prophet. He was very young, but he had a great and towering vision. He had the answer to all of their ardent prayers.

He was called Isa-tai, which was one of those Comanche names that delicate western sensibilities had trouble translating. Sometimes it is given as “rear end of a wolf,” which is amusing but inaccurate. Elsewhere it appears as “coyote droppings,” “coyote anus,” and “wolf shit.” But even these were euphemisms along the lines of “Buffalo Hump.” The more accurate translation would have been “wolf’s vulva,” or “coyote vagina,” both of which were unprintable until well into the twentieth century.
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He was a medicine man, a magician, and probably a con man, too, though there was no question that he believed at least some of what he was preaching. He was a Quahadi, probably around twenty-three years old, a stocky man with a large head, a broad, open face, and a bull neck. In the winter and spring of 1873–74 Isa-tai had established himself as the possessor of an electrifying sort of
puha
that Comanches had never seen before. He claimed miraculous healing powers and the ability to raise the dead.
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Though he was as yet untested in battle, he maintained that the white man’s bullets had no effect on him, and that he could also make medicine that would make others immune, even if they stood directly before the muzzles of the white man’s guns.
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These were impressive things, but not without precedent. Other shamans had claimed the same magic. That year, however, Isa-tai had, in the presence of witnesses, raised from his stomach a wagonload of cartridges, belched it up, and then swallowed it again. On four separate occasions he had—again, in front of witnesses—ascended into the skies, far beyond the sun, to the home of the Great Spirit, remaining there overnight and coming back the next day. Most astonishing of all, when a brilliant comet appeared in the sky, he had correctly predicted that it would disappear in five days.
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His legend spread throughout the plains. People said that he could control the elements, and send hail, lightning, and thunder against his enemies.

How did he convince people he could do these things? Part of the answer may lie in his abilities as a magician. In one account, he was able to make arrows appear in his hands, as though they had flown there out of the air.
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This sounds like the sort of sleight of hand that any competent modern magician could do. According to Quaker teacher Thomas Battey, who worked at
the time on the Kiowa reservation, Isa-tai had a particular technique for creating the illusion that he was rising into the clouds. He gathered people in a sacred spot, wrote Battey, then “tells them to look directly at the sun until he speaks to them, then to let their eyes slowly fall to the place where he is standing. As they do this they will see dark bodies descend to receive him, with which he will ascend.”
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He would then slip away, and remain concealed until his “return.”

But Isa-tai was about more than just magic. He had a vision of a new order on the plains. During his ascent into the clouds, the Great Spirit had endowed him with power to wage final war on the white man—a war that would not only kill many
taibos
but would restore the Comanche nation to its former glory. And this is what he now proposed to the Comanche tribe. That spring he moved among the bands, preaching that if they purified themselves, and stopped following the white man’s road, the time of salvation was near.

Then he expanded his evangelism to include Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Arapaho camps. Accompanying him on many of these trips was the charismatic young warrior Quanah, who had considerable battle experience and whose fame as a war chief was spreading across the plains.
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Together they were a formidable team. Isa-tai was the magic man; Quanah was the tough guy, the tall, battle-hardened warrior with rippling muscles and a startlingly direct gaze, the one you did not want to disappoint. Their pitch had its roots in one of the oldest of Comanche martial traditions: the revenge raid. Isa-tai had lost an uncle in the fight with Lieutenant Hudson, and so he and Quanah had both been grieving since January. Now that spring had arrived, they were ready for revenge. Quanah had always burned for retribution, ever since the
taibos
killed his father and took his mother and sister away. Now Isa-tai’s
puha
offered him the chance to wreak it on a colossal scale. Together, over a period of months, they managed to rouse the entire Comanche nation to a frenzy of hope and expectation.

Quanah later recalled his efforts at recruitment: “That time I pretty big man, pretty young man and knew how to fight pretty good. I work one month. I go to Nokoni Comanche camp on head of Cache Creek, call in everybody. I tell [them] about my friend kill him in Texas. I fill pipe. I tell that man: ‘You want to smoke?’ He take pipe and smoke it. I give it to another man. He say ‘I not want to smoke.’ If he smoke he go on war path. He not hand back. God kill him, he afraid. ”
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It is evident from this last line
that this was not a soft sell. Warriors’ courage, patriotism, and manhood were being called into question.

In May, Isa-tai did something that no Comanche leader in history had ever done: He sent runners to all the Comanche bands, on and off the reservation, summoning them to a Sun Dance. This was an extraordinary move for three reasons. First, there had never been a single council attended by all Comanches. Nothing even close to that had ever happened, at least since the tribe migrated south out of the Wind River country of Wyoming. Second, there had never been a single leader, a
paraibo,
with the power to convoke the whole tribe. And third, the Sun Dance was not a tradition of the Comanche tribe and never had been. The People had watched Kiowa ceremonies, but they had little or no idea of what a Sun Dance actually meant or how it was performed.

In spite of this, virtually the entire Comanche people agreed to come, even the sedentary Penatekas. The idea was to unite under this powerful new medicine and drive the whites forever from the plains. In concept it was not unlike Buffalo Hump’s great expedition, driven by his vision of white men falling into the sea, which had resulted in the Linnville Raid and the Battle of Plum Creek in 1840. The Sun Dance would thus be the focal point for the Comanche tribe’s second large-scale revenge raid against the white man.

The bands gathered in May on the Red River just west of the reservation boundary (near present-day Texola, where I-40 intersects the Texas-Oklahoma border). Though they did worship the sun, and usually blew the first puff of sacred smoke in its direction, they were true animists: power and magic was not concentrated in one or two places (such as a Great Spirit) but diffused throughout the universe. Power could reside in wolves and trees and rock bluffs as much as in the sun. But Comanches were intensely practical people; they were happy to try anything that worked, and Isa-tai was a persuasive man. So they dispensed with the military societies, the fetish dolls, the trained priests, the medicine bundles, the rite of warriors’ piercing their breast tendons with thongs and hanging from the lodge pole, and other traditions considered essential by other tribes.
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They built a medicine lodge of poles and brush and acted out sham battles and sham buffalo hunts. They danced a simplified, practical Sun Dance, and they held a massive party with a good deal of whiskey and feasting and all-night drum playing. They gloried in believing again in the power of Comanches.

In the end, perhaps half of the tribe agreed to follow Quanah and Isa-
tai. The exact number, or percentage, is unknown. The Penatekas, by now quite tame and even engaged in some farming, left for the reservation. They were frightened by such talk. Most of the Nokonis left, too, under their chief Horse Back, and many of the Yamparikas went with them. They did so under threat. Quanah’s people said they would kill their horses and strand them afoot if they did not go along.
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Some of the defectors were even threatened with personal violence. The Yamparika chief Quitsquip reported back to Indian agent J. M. Haworth that by night the Comanches were being whipped into a chauvinistic frenzy with whiskey, drumming, dancing, and war talk, only to lapse into confusion and indecision, and presumably hangovers, the next morning. “They have a great many hearts,” he told Haworth. “[They] make up their minds at night for one thing and get up in the morning entirely changed.”
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At their war councils, Quanah and Isa-tai promoted their idea of a revenge raid in Texas, starting with the traitor Tonkawas and moving on to a war on the settlements. But the tribal elders had other ideas, and overruled the two young men. Quanah later remembered it this way:

They said “You pretty good fighter, Quanah, but you not know everything. We think you take pipe first against the white buffalo hunters. You kill white men and make your heart feel good. After that you come back and take all young men and go Texas war path.” Isa-tai make big talk that time. [He said] “God tell me we going to kill lots of white men. I stop the bullets in gun. Bullets not penetrate shirts. We kill them just like old women.”
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So the first target would be the buffalo hunters at Adobe Walls. Then the full fury of the tribe would fall upon the hated Texans and their traitorous allies the Tonks. Armed with their powerful idea, Quanah and Isa-tai now visited the camps of the Kiowas, Cheyennes, and Arapahos to recruit warriors for the attack on the hide men. They had little success with the Kiowas, where, according to one of them, the elders “were afraid of that pipe.”
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Only a few of the tribe agreed to go. They had better luck with the Cheyennes, many of whom were enthusiastic about the expedition, especially with the protection of Isa-tai’s medicine. The Arapahos liked the idea but hedged: Powder Face, their main chief, was deeply committed to the white man’s road. Only twenty-two of them agreed to go, under the young upstart chief Yellow Horse. The force of two hundred fifty warriors was thus composed mainly of Comanches and Cheyennes. They were clear on three things: that the attack would be made on the buffalo camp forty miles to the west; that it would be made under Isa-tai’s protective magic; and that it would be led by
the young Quanah, who had impressed everyone with his burning passion and his singleness of purpose.