Quanah Parker: The Comanche Leader Who Rode With a President
Who Was Quanah Parker?
Quanah Parker was born on the southern Plains in the late 1840s or early 1850s, the son of the Comanche leader Peta Nocona and Cynthia Ann Parker, a white woman taken captive as a child in an 1836 raid on Parker’s Fort in Texas. He grew up a Comanche warrior and rose to lead the Quahada band, among the last Comanche people to stay free on the Plains.
In 1875, with the buffalo vanishing and the Army closing in, Quanah brought his people in to Fort Sill in Indian Territory. What he did next is why he is remembered. On the Kiowa, Comanche and Apache reservation he became the leading Comanche voice in dealings with the federal government, a man who could work in two worlds without giving up either.
Lobbying, Leasing and the Star House
Quanah traveled to Washington again and again to press his people’s interests. He negotiated grazing leases with Texas cattlemen on the reservation’s Big Pasture, bringing income to the tribes, and with their help he built a large two-story home near Cache, Oklahoma, known as the Star House.
In March 1905 he was one of six Native leaders who rode in Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade. A month later the two met again in Oklahoma. On April 8, 1905, Roosevelt left Frederick, Oklahoma, for several days of coyote and wolf coursing on the Comanche reserve, and Quanah rode with the party. The hunt became famous for Jack Abernathy, who caught wolves alive with his bare hands, but Roosevelt also wrote about Quanah in his account of the trip in Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter.
The Land Question
The friendship, such as it was, did not change the direction of federal policy. Allotment broke up the reservation, and in December 1906 the Big Pasture, about 488,000 acres, was sold by sealed bid. Quanah spent his last years trying to protect what his people still held.
He died at the Star House on February 23, 1911. His life shows how Native leaders of Roosevelt’s era used diplomacy, business and personal relationships to defend their nations when war was no longer possible.
Continue Reading
- Roosevelt and Indian Policy
- Roosevelt and Native Americans
- Geronimo
- Same Years, Different Ground: a timeline
Recommended Reading
- Quanah Parker, Comanche Chief by William T. Hagan (1993)
- “Parker, Quanah,” Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association
- Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter by Theodore Roosevelt (1905)