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By Root 4210 0

There was never a Native American that Roosevelt liked more than Parker. Because he had a white mother—Cynthia Ann Parker, who had been captured by Comanches in a raid near Groesbeck, Texas—Chief Quanah was a so-called half-breed. A tough Plains fighter in his youth, by 1905 he had become an American pragmatist, more of an optimist like William James than a fatalist like Crazy Horse. Yet there was also something mystical about him, an unaccountable reverence in his every utterance. Actually, some of Quanah’s guru wisdom may have been drug-induced. The chief used peyote; eating mescaline made him feel equal to every task, able to glide like a bird or crawl like a snake.

The advisability of taking such drugs is always doubtful, but they seemed to work for Quanah. He was bookish and knew that mescaline in the form of peyote buttons had been used along the Rio Grande Valley by Native Americans since 3,700 BC. In the sixteenth century, Spanish priests in Mexico forbade native people to use it; but as the Comanche lost their foothold in the American Southwest in the late nineteenth century, peyote came into vogue among them, like the Ghost Dance.24 In the face of defeat, why not get high and pray? Around 1890, after a particularly intense vision, Quanah created the Native American church movement. This religious experience led to his denouncing his past raids against white settlers and becoming a committed pacifist. He adopted peyote as a ritual for the Comanche and Kiowa. The bitter sweet taste of mescaline could, he believed, free his people’s minds from the white man’s tyranny, and at the very least it was far better than being locked up at Fort Sill or Fort Leavenworth. The fact that Quanah ate Lophophora williamsii was unimportant to Roosevelt, because the drug had brought Parker into the arms of Christ. “The white man goes into his church and talks about Jesus,” Roosevelt famously said. “But the Indian goes into his tipi and talks to Jesus.”25

No one knew for certain where Quanah was born. However, he claimed it was somewhere around the Wichitas; and just as Roosevelt had learned the North Dakota topography inside-out, Quanah understood every nook and cranny of his beloved Wichita range and the Llano Estacado (Stalked Plains). Even though Quanah wore his hair in long braids and had several wives, he nevertheless adopted many of the white man’s ways. An impetuous cordiality informed his dealings with white men. Often, he wore a business suit and derby hat. For example, his home in Cache, Oklahoma—the two-story, twelve-room “Star House,” where Roosevelt dined and slept on the porch one evening—was modeled after the U.S. Army general’s headquarters in Fort Sill. (Fourteen white stars symbolizing generals in the cavalry were painted on its red roof.26) It had been a gift of the Texan rancher Burk Burnett and was equipped with one of the first residential telephones in southwestern Oklahoma.27

What Roosevelt most admired about Quanah was his never-failing reverence for buffalo. Unlike Geronimo, the Chiricahua Apache who appeared in William Cody’s Wild West Show, Quanah never abandoned his vision of a vast “buffalo common” on the Great Plains. The deeds of the U.S. Cavalry never diminished his fervent belief in the prophecy of a rebirth for the buffalo. A hard worker, not given to idle hours, the soldierly Parker had no concept of quitting. In 1903, Roosevelt had been informed that the 101 Ranch in Bliss, Oklahoma, had hired the capricious Geronimo to lead a hunt for captured buffalo. This was a theatrical pageant: Geronimo, in war paint, would lead on horseback, followed by a convoy of automobiles whose drivers would shoot at terrified buffalo acquired from the Goodnight Ranch in Texas. When Roosevelt heard from the National Editorial Association about this inhumane and unsportsmanlike hunt, he was furious. He wired Governor Thompson B. Ferguson of the Oklahoma Territory to stop the brutality at once. Also, according to the New York Times, federal troops from Fort Sill were ordered to arrest the culprits.28

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