Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (55 page)

So the privilege of helping to finance Quanah’s new home went to the stockmen, after all, mainly to Burk Burnett. They were happy to oblige, though it is not known how much they contributed. Quanah certainly had substantial resources of his own. In 1890, Quanah’s new house was finished. It was indeed a ten-room, two-story clapboard affair, and it cost more than $2,000. The interior was finished beaded board, with ten-foot ceilings. There was a formal, wallpapered dining room with a long table and a wood-burning stove. The house sat on a splendid piece of high ground in the shadow of the Wichita Mountains. He later added a wide, colonnaded two-story porch to it and painted enormous white stars on the roof. His home became known as Star House and still stands today, having been moved twice. One of the great, obscure treasures of the American West, it occupies the back lot of a defunct amusement park behind an Indian trading post in Cache, Oklahoma.

The scene at Quanah’s splendid new house had no precedent in Comanche history; it could have existed only in the weird half-world of the reservation. No one had ever seen anything like it. He had a total of eight wives (one of them was Weckeah, the woman with whom he had eloped), seven of whom he married during the reservation period. Between them he fathered twenty-four children, five of whom died in infancy. Photographs of his wives taken in the 1880s and 1890s reveal women who are strikingly attractive. Quanah liked women, and somehow managed to keep them even though he infuriated existing wives by constantly courting new ones.
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In spite of Quanah’s arguments to the contrary, multiple wives no longer had a real place in the Comanche culture. Polygamy had been mainly a way of providing extra labor in tanning and processing buffalo. Those days were gone. Quanah had wives now simply because he wanted them and could afford them. His enormous family soon contained white members: two of Quanah’s daughters married white men. He adopted and raised two white boys of his own, one
of whom he found in a circus in San Antonio and adopted on the spot.
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He had adopted Herman Lehmann for three years, and Lehmann was so fond of his Comanche family that in 1901 he applied for full status as a tribe member.
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One young white man, Dick Banks, showed up at Star House just because he wanted to meet Quanah; he was given a bed and invited to stay indefinitely.
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Family members lived either at the house or in tipis in the front yard, which was surrounded by a white picket fence. Photographs from the era show the place with its double porches literally spilling over with people.

The remarkable scene consisted of more than just his own family. There were always many other Comanche tipis around the house, too. That was partly because of Quanah’s unfailing generosity—he fed many hungry Comanches over the years and never turned anyone away.
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According to people who knew him, feeding members of his tribe was the main use to which he put his private herd. Many sick Comanches came there in order to receive prayers—often related to peyote ceremonies (on which more later)—or, sometimes, in the knowledge that Quanah would handle the funeral arrangements. Most were put in beds inside Star House, which meant that family members slept in the tipis.
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His reputation as a healer drew white men as well, at least one of whom claimed to have been healed by him.
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There was also a constant stream of guests, white and Indian, at his dining room, a formal place with wainscoted and wallpapered walls, a molded tin ceiling, and a dinner table that would seat twelve comfortably.
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Quanah laid a splendid table. He hired white women to teach his wives how to cook, and for ten years employed a white servant, a Russian immigrant named Anna Gomez.
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Over the years guests included General Nelson Miles, who had tracked him in the Red River War, his neighbor Geronimo, Kiowa chief Lone Wolf, Charles Goodnight, Commissioner of Indian Affairs R. G. Valentine, British ambassador Lord Brice, Isa-tai, Burk Burnett and Daniel Waggoner, and eventually President Teddy Roosevelt. Though Quanah always refused to talk about his days as a Comanche warrior, he loved to hold forth on tribal politics, or on his frequent trips to Washington. He loved jokes. He dined often with a family named Miller, and at one meal he stated that the white man had pushed the Indian off the land. When Mr. Miller asked how the whites had done this, Quanah told him to sit down on a cottonwood log in the yard. Quanah sat down close to him and said “Move over.“ Miller moved. Parker moved with him, and again sat down close to him. “Move
over,” he repeated. This continued until Miller had fallen off the log. “Like that,” said Quanah.
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By 1890, Quanah’s letterhead read “Quanah Parker: Principal Chief of the Comanches,” a title he had been permitted by the agent to use. There had never been such a person before in the history of the tribe. There would never be another. He still had rivals, including the perennial second-rater Isa-tai, but the reality, acknowledged by the white man as well as most Comanches, was that he was the main chief. If, as F. Scott Fitzgerald suggested in the early twentieth century, there are no second acts in American lives, then Quanah was an exception to the rule. The lives of most of his fellow tribe members, however, proved Fitzgerald’s thesis admirably. That year most Comanche adult males still lived in tipis, wore their hair long as in the prereservation days, spoke little or no English, preferred their medicine men to the white man’s doctors, dressed in buckskins and blankets, and continued to condemn agriculture as women’s work.

While Quanah prospered, his friend Ranald Mackenzie’s life took an abrupt turn into sadness and tragedy. The change did not happen right away. During the years after the Red River War, Mackenzie was one of the most highly regarded officers in the U.S. Army. At Fort Sill he had further distinguished himself. As an administrator he may have been abrupt and easily angered, but he was also firm, fair, and just, and won the respect of Kiowas, Apaches, and Comanches alike. One particular story illustrates his stern and deliberate style of management. In 1876 a group of Comanches had illegally left the reservation, then had quietly returned. Mackenzie found out about it and ordered the chiefs to arrest the offenders. Instead of obeying, they showed up at his office wanting to parley. These were typical Indian tactics: parley, dither for an extended period of time, then find a compromise. Mackenzie listened patiently for half an hour to their harangue, while surreptitiously ordering his men to mount up and prepare for battle. He then rose from his desk, and calmly said, “If you do not bring in the renegades in twenty minutes, I will go to their camps and kill them all.” Then he left the room. The renegades were soon delivered.
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Sheridan thought so well of Mackenzie that he sent him and his crack Fourth Cavalry veterans north following Custer’s defeat at Little Bighorn in June 1876. Less than two months after Custer’s demise, Mackenzie assumed command of both the District of the Black Hills and Camp Robinson, the
fort that guarded the Red Cloud Sioux Agency. When a large group of Sioux scoffed at Mackenzie’s order to return to the reservation, he promptly took eighteen companies and surrounded the Indian village at dawn. Two hundred thirty-nine men surrendered, along with 729 horses.

That winter he was placed in charge of another major campaign: the Powder River Expedition against the Northern Cheyennes and their chief Dull Knife, a group that had taken part in the destruction of Custer’s troops. In heavy snow and subzero conditions, Mackenzie with 818 soldiers and 363 Indian scouts attacked Dull Knife’s village at dawn on November 25, 1876. They routed the Indians, killing twenty-five and wounding many more and capturing five hundred horses with the loss of only six of his own. In April, Dull Knife, hearing Mackenzie was still after him, surrendered. “You are the one I was afraid of when you came here last summer,” he told Mackenzie. Two weeks later Crazy Horse and 889 Sioux surrendered to Mackenzie at the Red Cloud Agency, ending the Sioux and Cheyenne war.
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The surrender stands as a sort of bookend to the twinned fates of Custer and Mackenzie, the one destined for eternal fame and glory, the other for obscurity and oblivion.

Mackenzie became Sherman and Sheridan’s favorite commander in the West, as he had been Grant’s favorite young officer in the Civil War. He was the one they sent to deal with difficult situations. In 1877 he was called to the border to subdue bandits. In 1879 and 1881 he went to deal with rebellious Utes in Colorado, issuing an ultimatum to them that resembled the one the Comanches had received at Fort Sill—with equivalent success. He crushed an uprising of Apaches in New Mexico and was so successful in dealing with the Indians in general that the governor and citizens of the state lobbied for his promotion to brigadier general. With former president Grant’s enthusiastic help, he got the promotion in October 1881.

But by that time something was already terribly wrong with Ranald Slidell Mackenzie. Soon after his promotion he wrote a letter to his superiors with the odd request for reassignment to a military court or retiring board. The handwriting in the letter was so poor as to suggest that the writer had suffered a stroke. He wanted the soft duty, said the tough-as-nails Mackenzie, because he had suffered “much harder in the last two years than anyone has any idea of.”
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It was the first hint of the calamitous changes that were taking place inside his head.

He was nevertheless assigned to the command of the Department of Texas, based in San Antonio. There, at the age of forty-three, he began a
rapid decline. Though he had forsworn alcohol throughout his career, he now began, unaccountably, to drink heavily. His eccentricities, notably his impatience and irritability, increased noticeably. For the first time anyone knew of, he began to keep the company of a lady, the thirty-four-year-old Florida Sharpe, with whom he had fallen in love in the late 1860s while on court-martial duty. (She had then been married to the base’s doctor.) On December 9, 1882, the army surgeon began treating Mackenzie for unusual behavior. On December 10 the quartermaster said that he thought Mackenzie was insane. A week later, General Mackenzie became engaged to Mrs. Sharpe, and it became known that he had purchased property in the nearby town of Boerne and had plans to retire there. On December 18 he drank too much and got into a fight with two local citizens. They had no idea who he was, so they beat him senseless and tied him to a cart where he was found the next day. Several days later he was loaded onto a train under the pretext that Sheridan had something important to speak with him about in Washington. On December 29 he was checked in to the Bloomingdale Asylum in New York City. On March 5, an army retiring board declared, over his protests, that he was insane and therefore not fit for duty.

The rest of his life was a steady descent into madness. He remained in the asylum until June, still protesting his forced retirement, when he went to live with his sister at his boyhood home in Morristown, New Jersey. He had plans to revisit Texas and his property in Boerne, but he never moved again. Mrs. Sharpe never spoke of him. His physical and mental health deteriorated; he grew more and more childish until he could no longer make himself understood. He died in a New York hospital on January 18, 1889, at the age of forty-eight.

What caused Mackenzie’s madness? There are several theories. For many years it was thought that his condition was the result of syphilis. But this is unlikely. The army knew all about syphilis, dealt with it constantly, and there is no record of Mackenzie ever being treated for it. One historian suggested that his illness was the result of post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition that was unknown at the time. Mackenzie’s horrific wounds and central role in many Civil War battles certainly could have produced it, and his irritability, explosive temper, and difficulty forming close relationships are common symptoms. He had also suffered an odd accident back in 1875. In the autumn of that year, he somehow fell off a cart at Fort Sill and injured his head so badly that he was in a stupor for three days. It was said
that he became unusually irritable in the days that followed. Finally, there is the more remote possibility that the sunstroke he had suffered as a child had something to do with it. We will never know. His death went virtually unnoticed. Quanah, who was forty at the time, making his way in the new, civilized West that Mackenzie had made possible, must have heard about it, though there is no record of his reaction. The day after Mackenzie’s death the following death notice appeared on the obituary page of the
New York Times
:

MACKENZIE—At New Brighton, Staten Island, on the 19th of January, Brig. Gen. Ranald Slidell Mackenzie, United States Army, in the 48th year of his age.

In its brevity and lack of detail, the item suggested a minor military figure, perhaps someone who had won a medal or two in the war, and had then been put out to grass in some lonely outpost of the new empire. There was no news item in the
Times
or any other newspapers with the particulars of his life. The event would have seemed to have no more significance to the casual reader than the passing of a manager in a local dry goods company.