Comanche Sundown: A Novel

Afterword

387 Afterword I grew up in country along the Texas side of the Red River that was not peaceably settled until the Comanches and Kiowas gave up their resistance in the 1870s. Nearby small towns named Quanah and Nocona honored our history with the names and steadily percolating lore, but not with statues. One day a friend and I clambered across the eerie Medicine Mounds and explored the bend of the Pease River where the rangers of Sul Ross and Charles Goodnight captured the Comanche woman who turned out to be Cynthia Ann Parker. Another day, in Oklahoma’s Wichita Mountains , I watched soldiers at Fort Sill practice rappelling on the black stone face of Medicine Bluff, another place of spiritual importance to the Comanches. In nearby Cache I found Quanah’s famed Star House still standing and looking pretty sound. The pasture around it was littered with odd junk of some dormant carnival. Early on, as this interest began to take form as a book, a friend suggested that I write a biography of Quanah Parker. It seemed like an easier climb to him. I thought about it and decided that even with someone as chronicled and lionized as Quanah, that book would leave me with too much mystery. Quanah’s last speech, at the State Fair in Dallas in 1910, was quoted in the press in the condescending herky-jerky Indian dialect of the day. On the battle of the Blanco Canyon: “No ride me in like horse or cow. Had big war. I fought General Mackenzie. He had 2,000 men. I had 450 men. I use this knife. I see little further, perhaps eight miles, lots soldiers coming. I say hold on—no go over there. Maybe we go at night. Maybe stampede soldiers’ horses first. I gathered maybe 350 United States horses that night. You see how bad me was at that time?” Who 388 knows, maybe he really spoke English that way. Yet I found letters he wrote to Charles Goodnight and other rancher friends in a big graceful hand, and his phrasing was formal and concise but articulate . His life was torn in two and the world of his birth and rearing was destroyed when he was thirty years old. Only in fiction could I begin to conceive what may have gone on in such a man’s mind. Quanah Parker and Bose Ikard are known to have encountered each other once in a furious running fight between young cowboys and Comanche raiders that occurred in the Palo Pinto country west of Weatherford on April 24, 1869. I found a brief but vivid description of the battle in History of Parker County and the Double Log Cabin by G. A. Holland (1937). My fictionalization of that event, in which young Quanah was noted for wearing a blue U.S. Army coat, was the point of departure. These characters are fictional, but their evolution in my imagination and on the page was informed and bolstered by twenty years of research and a lifetime of intense curiosity. My test of historical fiction is what’s plausible—I was after what could have occurred. Quanah and Bose were about the same age, and they were in many of the same places at the same times. In history Bose is known for that one Indian fight, in which he rode as a freed slave with his white half-brother, and J. Evetts Haley relayed praise of him in Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman (1936). Larry McMurtry fictionalized him memorably in his 1985 masterpiece, Lonesome Dove. Bose was an Indian fighter and drover on cattle drives led by Goodnight and Oliver Loving for three or four years in the late 1860s. After being freed from slavery to his father, he wound up employed as Goodnight’s trusted “detective and banker” on the perilous trail they blazed across West Texas and New Mexico Territory . Prospering on a ranch in southern Colorado, the trail boss then told him to go back to the Palo Pinto country and learn how to farm, because there were other black people there. Bose’s adventures while making that solitary trek are unknown. He gained a large family and lived in and around Weatherford until 1929. A school 389 there is named for him. Like Quanah, Bose must have developed a unique outlook on life. Weckeah was one of the first of Quanah...