Quanah Parker — the Last Chief

You heard the hard tale of what ended in this canyon in eighteen seventy-four — Boone Merrick again — so now let me tell you about a man who walked out of that ending and became something nobody could ever have guessed. His name was Quanah Parker, the last chief of the free Comanche, and his story is about the strangest and most remarkable in all the West.

Start with his mother, because you couldn't make it up. Back in eighteen thirty-six, a Comanche raiding party swept up a nine-year-old white settler girl named Cynthia Ann Parker and carried her off into the plains. And here's the thing that turns the whole story — she didn't want to go back. She grew up Comanche, took a Comanche name, married a Comanche war chief, loved him, and bore him children out on this grass. The oldest was a boy named Quanah. Years later, Texas Rangers 'rescued' Cynthia Ann against her will, dragged her back to her white relatives — and she was wretched, pined away for her Comanche husband and children and the free life, tried more than once to run back to the plains, and finally died of a broken heart. Her son Quanah grew up to be the fiercest young war chief on the Southern Plains — half white by blood, all Comanche in his soul, and for years he didn't even know his mother's people were looking for him.

Quanah was one of the leaders the army was hunting in the fall of eighteen seventy-four, one of the very last holdouts. After this canyon, after the horses were shot at Tule and the winter food burned, he held out on the open plains through a hard, hungry year — the last free band of a free people. But in the spring of eighteen seventy-five, cold and starving and watching his children suffer, Quanah did the hardest thing a proud man can do. He rode in and surrendered, to spare his people, and led them onto the reservation at Fort Sill. And with that, the free Comanche were finished.

But here's the turn, friend, and it is a genuine wonder. Most defeated chiefs faded away and died broken. Not Quanah. He looked square at the world that had beaten him, and instead of dying of grief, he set out to master it. He learned English. He learned business, and law, and money. He leased his people's grassland to the cattle barons and invested the proceeds shrewd. He built himself a big fine house — folks called it the Star House, with white stars painted on the roof — and became a wealthy, powerful man and the acknowledged leader of all the Comanche. He kept his long braids and his old ways and his several wives, and he also dined with cattlemen and railroad men, and rode in President Theodore Roosevelt's inauguration parade. And at long last he went and found his white mother's Parker kin, and claimed them, and took her surname for his own — Quanah Parker, both halves of himself joined in the one name. When he died, he had them lay his mother to rest right beside him.

Think hard on that, friend. The last war chief of the free Comanche, whose whole world ended right here in this canyon, flat refused to let it end him. He walked out of catastrophe and built an entire second life with his bare hands and his sharp mind, and carried his whole people into a strange new century on his back. That is not surrender. That is the very toughest kind of courage there is — the kind it takes to keep on living, and keep on leading, after everything you loved has been shot dead in a canyon. Remember his name. Quanah Parker. He was the last of the old free chiefs, and just about the first of a new kind of one.