Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (64 page)

25
. Quanah Parker to Charles Adams, interview, May 13, 1890, Kiowa Agency files, Oklahoma History Center.

26
. James T. DeShields,
Cynthia Ann Parker: The Story of Her Capture,
pp. 78–79.

27
. Hugh Lennox Scott,
Some Memories of a Soldier,
p. 151.

28
.
Hobart Democrat-Chief
(Oklahoma), August 4, 1925, interview with Knox Beall who said that Grantham was adopted and also Quanah’s business adviser.

29
. Commissioner T. J. Morgan to Agent Adams, interview, December 18, 1890, Kiowa Agency files, Oklahoma Historical Society.

30
. Profile of Charlie Hart by Evelyn Fleming, manuscript, Quanah Parker papers, Panhandle Plains Historical Museum.

31
. Knox Beall to R. B. Thomas, interview, November 5, 1937, Indian Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma; Beall to Bessie Thomas, April 15, 1938.

32
. Lehmann, pp. 233–34.

33
. Dick Banks to Bessie Smith, interview, Indian Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma.

34
. Robert B. Thomas, undated manuscript, Indian Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma; also Beall to Thomas, November 5, 1937.

35
. Anna Gomez to Ophelia D. Vestal, interview, December 13, 1937, Indian Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma.

36
. Letter: Bob Linger to Quanah, March 9, 1909, in Neeley Archive at Panhandle Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, Texas.

37
. Star House still exists, in somewhat deteriorated condition, in Cache, Oklahoma. My tour of it included the dining room, which, based on photographs from the early twentieth century, is substantially as it was. The only way to tour it is by inquiring at the old trading post in Cache.

38
. Gomez to Vestal, interview, December 13, 1937.

39
. Memoirs of Mrs. Cora Miller Kirkpatrick, in Mrs. J. W. Pierce manuscript, Quanah Parker collection, Panhandle Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, Texas.

40
. Ernest Wallace,
Ranald S. Mackenzie on the Texas Frontier,
p. 170.

41
. Ibid., p. 172.

42
. Ibid., p. 190.

Twenty-one
THIS WAS A MAN

1
. William T. Hagan,
Quanah Parker, Comanche Chief,
p. 65.

2
. September 26, 1892, Hearing at Fort Sill, Comanches, Apaches, Kiowas, Quanah Parker Collection, Panhandle Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, Texas.

3
. William T. Hagan,
United States-Comanche Relations,
p. 287.

4
. Knox Beall to R. B. Thomas, interview, November 5, 1937, Indian Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma.

5
. Robert Thomas, document in Indian Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma, University of Oklahoma.

6
. Mrs. J. L. Dupree to Jasper Mead, interview, March 17, 1938; Indian Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma.

7
. George W. Briggs to Eunice M. Mayer, interview, June 17, 1937, Indian Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma.

8
. Robert G. Carter,
Tragedies of Canon Blanco,
pp. 79–80.

9
. “Quanah Route Day Draws Large Crowds,”
Dallas Morning News,
October 25, 1910.

10
. Robert Thomas document, in Indian Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma.

11
. T. R. Roosevelt,
Outdoor Pastimes of the American Hunter,
p. 100.

12
. Bill Neeley,
The Last Comanche Chief,
p. 220, citing 1985 Neeley interview with Anona Birdsong Dean.

13
. Letter: T. R. Roosevelt to Francis Leupp, April 14, 1905, Indian Office Letters Rec’d.

14
. Unidentified newspaper story about the school board in Quanah Parker Collection, Panhandle Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, Texas.

15
. Ernest Wallace and E. Adamson Hoebel,
The Comanches,
pp. 332ff.

16
.
Hobart Democrat-Chief
(Oklahoma),
August 4, 1925.

17
. Hagan,
Quanah Parker, Comanche Chief,
p. 113.

18
. Frank Cummins Lockwood,
The Apaches,
p. 326; Hagan,
Quanah Parker, Comanche Chief,
p. 129.

Twenty-two
RESTING HERE UNTIL DAY BREAKS

1
. “Quanah Route Day Draws Large Crowd,”
Dallas Morning News,
October 25, 1910.

2
. Ibid.

3
. William T. Hagan,
Quanah Parker, Comanche Chief,
p. 124.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

As I hope will be apparent to the reader, much of this book was constructed using a large number of firsthand accounts from the era. When sweeping through three hundred years of history, secondary sources are of course helpful as guides and summaries, but the most valuable resources are always the unfiltered ones. I was extremely fortunate, living in Austin, Texas, to be able to avail myself of the astounding literary and archival materials at the University of Texas libraries, especially the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, which, in the pursuit of Comanche history, must be regarded as ground zero. Extensive archival materials were also used from the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum archives in Canyon, Texas, and at the Western History Collection at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma. The latter contains the Indian Pioneer History Project, a set of interviews conducted in the 1930s with people whose memories stretched well back into the nineteenth century. I used this heavily in my last chapters on Quanah, and indeed much of what I know about him in the last few decades of his life come from those voluminous interviews. Also extremely useful is Kiowa Agency material at the Oklahoma Historical Society/Oklahoma History Center, which has great detail on Quanah’s reservation years. The archives at the Fort Sill museum have regrettably been closed indefinitely to scholars. This required a good deal of hustling on my part to try to find those Comanche materials elsewhere, including the incomparable 1897 Hugh Lenox Scott interviews with Quanah and other items in the W. S. Nye collection. (Many were in the Neely subarchive in Canyon.) Much of my time researching this book was spent at the Briscoe Center, with various rare books, records, dusty archives, and typed and handwritten manuscripts in front of me. (My favorite moment was when several hundred Confederate dollars came fluttering down out of a file full of handwritten manuscripts I was reading. The money looked almost new.)

That and other archival material allowed me to reconstruct the major historical events narrated in the story from authoritative, if not deep, firsthand accounts. These include the events at Parker’s Fort and subsequent captivities of family members; the rise of the Texas Rangers including the careers of Jack Hays and Rip Ford (firsthand from Noah Smithwick, Rip Ford, Major John Caperton, B. F. Gholson, Charles Goodnight, and others); the “rescue” of Cynthia Ann Parker, the Council House Fight, Linnville Raid and Battle of Plum Creek, the Battle at Adobe Walls, and the Red River War. The detailed account of the Battle of Blanco Canyon came from men who rode with Mackenzie (Captain Robert G. Carter’s “On the Border with Mackenzie” is one of the great documents of the American West). The Red River War was similarly based on contemporary accounts and aided by the wonderful compilation by the West Texas Museum: “Ranald S. Mackenzie’s Official Correspondence Relating to Texas,” in two volumes, covering the years 1871–79. Captain George Pettis left behind a remarkable blow-by-blow account of Kit Carson’s fight with the Comanches in 1860. Primary sources were also used to write some of the early
history of the Comanches, most notably the writings of Athanase de Mézières, a Spanish administrator from 1769 and one of the most effective Indian agents of all time, as well as Spanish government reports.

The best descriptions of Texas in the early to mid-nineteenth century come from several contemporaneous sources: Captain Randolph Marcy was a superb and reliable reporter, as were Colonel Richard Irving Dodge and the artist George Catlin. All delivered raw, unvarnished firsthand looks at the unspoiled Indian frontier. Life inside Comanche bands before the reservation period comes alive in the memoirs of a number of captives, including Dot Baab, Herman Lehmann, Clinton Smith, and Nelson Lee. (Though the latter clearly fictionalized some of his story, other parts remain useful.) Other contemporary chronicles, like reservation teacher Thomas Battey’s 1875 book
Life and Adventures of a Quaker Among the Indians,
were also quite useful. Mary Maverick’s memoir of old San Antonio, including the Council House Fight and the rise of Jack Hays and the Rangers, is indispensable.

For secondary sources, nothing can quite match Ernest Wallace and E. Adamson Hoebel’s magisterial ethnography based in large part on ethnological studies from the 1930s:
Comanches: Lords of the South Plains.
Wilbur Nye’s Carbine and Lance: The Story of Old Fort Sill,
and Rupert Richardson’s
Comanche Barrier to South Plains Settlement
were the books that broke the first major ground on Comanche history. The two extant full-length biographies of Mackenzie, Wallace’s
Ranald S. Mackenzie on the Texas Frontier,
and Charles M. Robinson III’s
Bad Hand,
are well researched and useful. The section on the Comanches in Walter Prescott Webb’s 1931 masterpiece
The Great Plains
is what got me interested in the subject in the first place, and his work on the Texas Rangers remains definitive. T. R. Fehrenbach’s
The Comanches: Destruction of a People
is well written and remains the modern classic in the field. To these I would add two more current works: William T. Hagan’s superb biography of Quanah, which focuses on the reservation years, and Jo Ella Powell Exley’s
Frontier Blood,
a solid piece of research centered on the extended Parker clan.

The rest of my research was done by automobile: crossing and recrossing the plains of Comancheria, visiting the marvelous reconstruction of Parker’s Fort in Groesbeck, Texas, touring forts such as Richardson, Concho, and Phantom Hill, nearly getting stuck in the ice at Adobe Walls, climbing in the Wichita Mountains, hunting down various battle sites on the Pease River and elsewhere. One of the highlights was finding Quanah’s old Star House in an abandoned amusement park in Cache, Oklahoma. It is in moderate stages of decay but everything is still there, including the dining room where Roosevelt and Geronimo once came to dinner (on separate occasions). I have lived in Texas for fifteen years now, and my understanding of the state’s peculiar geography, and particularly the geography of the west Texas plains, was an enormous aid in writing this book.

BOOKS

Atkinson, M. J.
The Texas Indians.
San Antonio, Tex.: Naylor Co., 1935.

———.
Indians of the Southwest.
San Antonio, Tex.: Naylor Co., 1963.

Baab, T. A.
In the Bosom of the Comanches.
Dallas: Hargreaves Printing Co., 1923 (second edition of 1912 original).

Baker, T. Lindsay, and Harrison, Billy R.
Adobe Walls, the History and Archaeology of the 1874 Trading Post.
College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1986.

Bancroft, Hubert H.
History of Arizona and New Mexico.
San Francisco: The History Company, 1889.

Battey, Thomas.
Life and Adventures of a Quaker Among the Indians.
Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1875.

Bedford, Hilory G.
Texas Indian Troubles.
Pasadena, Tex.: Abbotsford Publishing Company, 1966 (facsimile of 1905 original by Hargreaves Printing Co. of Dallas).