History Lesson 
The Lost Tribe
Exiled from the Texas plains they once ruled, Comanches are haunted by the richness of their past.
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The Comanches were stocky, barrel-chested, prone to near-sightedness. Their faces were broad, with heavy, looming features. The men were vain and superstitious about their hair, keeping it long and greased with buffalo dung, and their ceremonial leggings and moccasins were distinguished by long trails of fringe that dragged on the ground. Comanches filled the cavities in their teeth with dried mushrooms, powdered their babies with cottonwood rot, and directed attention to their war wounds by outlining the scars with tattoos. Boys shot hummingbirds out of the air, snaring them in the split shaft of an arrow. Although there was no prescribed cosmology, the Comanches had a complex and appreciative awareness of a world brimming with spirits and half-glimpsed designs. Unlike other Plains tribes, they did not have an overarching tribal unity. The Comanches were parceled out into bands, and each band was an ad hoc government unto itself, led by men who had become chiefs not through any formal process but through the uncontested power of their personalities.
Long before, when they first filtered down out of the eastern Rockies onto the plains, the Comanches had been just another wandering tribe of bandy-legged pedestrians. But when they encountered the shaggy mustangs that the Spanish had brought to the New World, it was as if they had found some long-missing component of their own identity. The Comanches adapted to the horse with breathtaking commitment. They understood better than any other Indians what a powerful new technology this creature represented. The Apaches, for instance, made only limited use of the horse as a war tool, using it to carry them longer distances on a raid but ultimately dismounting to fight. Comanches fought on horseback, seated on rawhide facsimiles of Spanish saddles or hanging low along the horse’s shoulder, loosing arrows from beneath its neck. They learned to breed horses and became wealthy by plains standards. It was not unusual for a Comanche warrior to have a string of 250 ponies, for a chief to have as many as 1,500.
The horse made the Comanches dangerous, but they had always been predators. Boys became men, and men acquired status, primarily through deeds of war. Texas history is filled with accounts—some bogus, some not—of Comanche savagery. Settlers who encountered the mutilated bodies of their loved ones—the scalps taken, the genitals ripped off, the entrails baking in the sun—were understandably eager to propagate the notion that Comanches were demons who wallowed in the blackest depths of human cruelty. Torture and ritual mutilation were not confined to the Indians, of course. The difference was that white society had learned to fear and scorn in itself the very bloodlust that the Comanches openly celebrated.
For hundreds of years the Comanches held the plains by right of conquest. They were able to keep Spain from establishing an effective colonial claim on Texas, and they fought the more relentless American juggernaut with desperate ferocity through many bitter generations. But by 1874—the year of the pivotal battle at Adobe Walls—it was pretty much over. Most of the bands—their populations halved by disease, their livelihood and morale shattered by the unimaginable efficiency with which the hide hunters were destroying the buffalo—had already retreated along with the Kiowas and Apaches to the reservation at Fort Sill in southwest Oklahoma. Seven years earlier, at the Treaty of Medicine Lodge, a Comanche chief named Ten Bears—who had visited Abraham Lincoln in the White House and had been shown Comancheria on a great globe in the State Department—had made a speech of defiance that was in tone an unmistakable elegy: “I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures and everything drew a free breath...If the Texans had kept out of my country, there might have been peace...But it is too late. The whites have the country which we loved, and we wish only to wander on the prairie until we die…”
The Comanches knew they were living in an apocalyptic time, and they were susceptible to any sort of messianic logic that could fuel their resistance. A young man called Ishatai—whose name translated to “Coyote Droppings”—rose up among them as a prophet. He was credited with predicting the appearance of a comet, claimed miraculous powers, an asserted with conviction what the Comanches most longed to hear: that the white men could be driven from the plains, that the buffalo could be restored, that life as it had always been understood could resume. Ishatai inspired an avenging alliance of Comanches, Kiowas, and Cheyennes. The first objective was Adobe Walls, an isolated trading post a few miles north of the Canadian River in the Texas Panhandle that had been set up to accommodate the hide hunters and skinners who had come south to annihilate the last great herds of buffalo.
Though Ishatai was a spiritual leader, he did not claim to be a war chief. That role, according to legend, fell to Quanah, a prominent young warrior from the Kwahadi band who was destined to become the most famous Comanche who ever lived. Quanah was the son of a chief named Peta Nocona and the celebrated white captive Cynthia Ann Parker. Cynthia Ann had been seized by the Comanches at the age of nine on a terror-filled day in 1836, when the Indians had raided her family’s settlement in East Texas. Her adjustment to Comanche ways was thorough—she married Peta Nocona and bore him three children, including Quanah—but her life was bracketed by shock and heartbreak. After 25 years as a Comanche she was recaptured when Rangers raided a camp on the Pease River. Though Cynthia Ann could speak no English, she broke into confused tears when she heard her name. She and her fifteen-month-old daughter, Topsannah, were treated with kindness, and the Texas Legislature even voted her a pension. But her one wish—to be released back onto the prairie with the rest of her family—was denied. When her daughter died she grieved with the savage intensity of a Comanche mother, and not long after that she herself perished from what has been variously described as a broken heart, a “strange fever,” or self-starvation.
Quanah was a teenager when his mother was stolen from his world. At the time of the battle of Adobe Walls he was about twenty—a cunning, fearless, embittered warrior commanding a force of perhaps seven hundred men who, thanks to Ishatai’s mystical power—his medicine—believed themselves magically invincible. The Indians arrived at Adobe Walls on a warm June night and attacked the collection of sod buildings in the predawn darkness of the next morning. Adobe Walls was inhabited that night by fewer than thirty buffalo hunters and storekeepers, and Quanah had counted on overrunning them while they slept. But the buffalo men had been up most of the night fixing a broken roof support in the saloon, and their wakefulness spoiled the surprise attack. The defenders managed to barricade themselves in time, though one man was killed as he ran for cover, and two brothers, German teamsters who had been sleeping in their wagon, were discovered and brutally dispatched. The frustrated Indians even scalped the teamsters’ dog.
The raid quickly turned into a disaster. The Indians—whose notion of warfare relied on individual initiative and abrupt, feinting charges—were unprepared for a coordinated assault on an entrenched position. The hide hunters, on the other hand, were superb marksmen, accustomed to leisurely potting hundreds of buffalo a day at long range with their Sharps rifles. As warrior after warrior went down, the Comanches and their allies quickly discovered that Ishatai’s protective medicine was a cruel illusion. Quanah himself was wounded. Three quarters of a mile away, at the top of a low mesa, wearing nothing but his yellow medicine paint, the prophet Ishatai sat on his horse, watching the fight. His powers had proven so ineffective that they could not even protect a warrior next to him who was knocked from his horse by a spectacular shot from one of the distant buffalo guns.
After a lingering siege that lasted three days, the attackers withdrew, unable to recover their dead. The buffalo hunters cut off the heads of the Indians they had killed and impaled them on stakes. The alliance that Ishatai had put together fell apart, and though Quanah and his band continued raiding for some months afterward, the medicine was gone. That fall, U.S. soldiers surprised a Kwahadi camp in the Palo Duro Canyon and captured most of the remaining free Comanches. Then they shot their horses. Nine months later Quanah and Ishatai led the People, under army escort, onto the reservation. The trek to Fort Sill took a month. A doctor who accompanied the Comanches and joined them on their last buffalo hunt as free men had the time of his life. “I never felt so delighted,” he wrote, unwittingly memorializing the vanished joys of Comanche existence, “as when mounted on a fleet horse bounding over the prairie.”
“We must have been an ornery group of people.” Kenneth Saupitty, the chairman of the Comanche Tribal Business Committee, reflected as we sat one October morning in his office. Saupitty was, in effect, the Comanche chief, though that title had been retired after Quanah’s death. (“Resting here until day breaks and shadows fall and darkness disappears,” reads his tombstone in the Fort Sill post cemetery. “Quanah Parker, Last Chief of the Comanches.”) Saupitty was 51 but looked younger. His hair was short, with no gray in it, and his cordial, chatty demeanor made him seem at first acquaintance more like a middle manager than the chief executive of an Indian nation.
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