Quanah Parker: 'Transformed'

The white man goes into his church and talks about Jesus,” Parker once said, “but the Indian goes into his tipi and talks to Jesus.”

Quanah Parker 1906 Age:58

Every day has its story and today's should be shared.  My mom, dad and I were slaving away at work this afternoon when the mail arrived and in the boring pile of bills one stood out from the rest.  Bold words read, 'Attention Quanna'.  The envelope carried a carefully cut out New York Times article titled, Men on Horseback featuring my mother's great grandfather, the last and greatest Comanche Chief, Quanah Parker.

My mom was named after her great Comanche grandfather, Quanah Parker due to her red skin, black hair and deep blue eyes at birth.  However, her hair turned red at age one, then blonde by two years of age.  Most people look at her and only know she is of Native American descent when they see her prominent cheek bones and deep set eyes...her eyes remained a mesmerizing deep blue.  One of the things I love about my mother is that even when she has done 5 hours of yard work she always smells sweet.  Since I was a child I would bundle myself up on her side of the bed just to smell her scent when she was away at work.  In Indian tradition the name process of a child was thought of deeply and sincerely.  Quanah means FRAGRANCE.  I think it's quite symbolic that my mother, no matter what perfume,  has a very distinct scent, it's unlike anything my sense of smell has captured.  My mom has many great qualities and as I've read stories about my second great grandfather, Quanah, I've learned he was a man of passion, spiritualism, zeal, integrity and heart.  He was a leader and led many victories for his Comanche tribe.  My mom is quietly passionate, God loving- fearless leader for wounded people...much like her shadowed name, Quanah.

I will share a few excerpts from the article and leave a link for the full article if you have the time to read!
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/books/review/Barcott-t.html?pagewanted=1

Quanah Parker exemplifies the more deserving who get left in the shadows. One hopes a better fate awaits “Empire of the Summer Moon,” S. C. ­Gwynne’s transcendent history of Parker and the Comanche nation he led in the mid- to late 1800s. Born the son of an Indian warrior and his white wife (who had been captured at the age of 9 during a raid on a Texas ranch), Parker grew up to become the last and greatest chief of the Comanche, the tribe that ruled the Great Plains for most of the 19th century. That’s his one-sentence biography. The deeper, richer story that unfolds in “Empire of the Summer Moon” is nothing short of a revelation. Gwynne, a former editor at Time and Texas Monthly, doesn’t merely retell the story of Parker’s life. He pulls his readers through an American frontier roiling with extreme violence, political intrigue, bravery, anguish, corruption, love, knives, rifles and arrows. Lots and lots of arrows. This book will leave dust and blood on your jeans.

The Comanche didn’t raid for sport. They had specific political and economic ends in mind. The political goal was to drive the white settlers (squatters and land thieves, from the tribe’s point of view) out of Comanche territory. To that end, death, terror and torture proved to be effective. By the 1860s the Comanche were actually rolling the frontier backward in Texas. The economics of raiding were equally straightforward. Young Cynthia Ann Parker was captured and not killed partly because the Comanche needed women to keep their buffalo economy humming. The men killed the bison, but the women, Gwynne writes, “did all the value-added work: preparing the hides and decorating the robes.” The more captives and wives — as with Cynthia Parker, the former sometimes became the latter — the more product a man could produce.

Parker had a son named Quanah. Quanah grew up quickly. When he was 12, his father was killed in battle and his mother was captured by white troops. (They saw it as a rescue, but Parker was forever trying to escape back to the Comanche.) A vengeful Quanah began raiding white settlements. He was good at it, too. But skill in battle wasn’t his problem. Timing was. He happened to rise as a leader just as the whites acquired their own transformative technology: the railroad and the repeating firearm. The railroad could cheaply transport valuable buffalo hides to Eastern markets, which made it profitable for men like Buffalo Bill to massacre the great herds. Between 1868 and 1881, 31 million buffalo were slaughtered, destroying the source of Comanche wealth and food. Meanwhile, the nimble Colt revolver and the powerful Sharps .50-caliber rifle countered the Comanche’s once-superior weaponry. The empire crumbled.




Quanah Parker’s second act was, if anything, more remarkable than his first. Resigned to reservation life, he transformed himself from a death-dealing warrior to a prosperous cattleman and a hard-bargaining politician who earned the respect and friendship of Teddy Roosevelt. He played a leading role in establishing the Native American Church and its practice of peyotism, the use of hallucinogenic peyote cactus in religious ritual. “In a 370-page biography, Gwynne devotes but a single paragraph to Parker and peyote. There are simply too many other good stories to tell.

***Can I just say that I read this article and cried.  I'm overwhelmingly proud that this man is my ancestor.  It makes me want to live my life more passionately and purpose filled.  Trust me, I won't be riding horseback and leading raids but maybe in my dreams, I will......haaahaaa...;)