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AUGUST 2016 PA R K E R C O U N T Y T O D AY
white people. Got great heart. I want my people follow
after white way, get educated, know work, make living
when payments stop. I tell ‘em they got to know [how to]
pick cotton, plow corn. I want them to know white man’s
God. Comanche may die today, tomorrow, ten years.
When end comes then they all be together again. I want
to see my mother again then.”
In less than three months’ time Quanah Parker, 66, lay
dead beside his mother. As reported in The Lawton Daily
News of Feb. 23, 1911, the great chief “died at his ranch
near here at five minutes past noon today… .”
According to the article, Quanah was dying on a train
ride home from Snyder, but with “primitive stoicism he
determined to live until he reached his home… .” Once
in Cache, the chief reportedly disembarked unaided
and walked into the doctor’s office where a doctor
administered “a heart stimulant.” Then his son-in-law
rushed him home by automobile. A white physician and
a medicine man attended him in his home, the medicine
man wrap ping an arm around Quanah and flapping his
hands as if in flight and mimicking the cry of the sacred
eagle. Fittingly, “Eagle” had long been a name the People
used when referring to Quanah. At the very end “an
eagle bone was thrust into Quanah’s throat to open it and
To-nicy, his favorite wife, squirted a mouthful of water
down his throat. He coughed, gasped, moved his lips
feebly, and died, just twenty minutes after his arrival.”
His gravestone bore the phrase “Last Chief of the
34
Comanches.” The title of “chief” died with Quanah;
subsequent Comanche leaders have been referred to as
“chairmen.”
One last move awaited Chief Quanah Parker and his
mother in 1957. Expansion of a missile base resulted in
their exhumation and reburial in Fort Sill Post Cemetery
in Lawton. Even in death it seemed the U.S military could
not let him be. But his one-time enemies did bury him
with full military honors.
And so the storied saga of the mysterious Indian
captive who resisted reunification with her white family
and her half-Comanche son who became a great warrior
chief and later emissary for peace with the whites came
to an end. Their story surely will long be remembered as
one of the most compelling of the Texas Frontier and the
American West.
Sources:
• The Last Comanche Chief: The Life and Times of Quanah
Parker, Bill Neely, 1995, John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
• www.history.com
• Handbook of Texas Online
• Last Days of the Comanches, S.C. Gwynne, May 2010 Texas
Monthly
• Charles Goodnight, Cowman and Plainsman, by J. Evetts
Haley, University of Oklahoma Press, 1981.
• Hobart Democrat-Chief, Aug. 4, 1925
• Other Internet sources