Fort Worth Characters

Chapter 8: Quanah Parker: Fort Worth’s Adopted Native Son

149 In the heart of the Fort Worth Stockyards National Historic District stands a statue of legendary Comanche Chief Quanah Parker. It is fitting that the statue stands in front of a hotel because Quanah himself was never more than a visitor to Fort Worth. He never resided here, did not have family roots here, and visited the city only rarely. Yet this son of a Comanche father and an Anglo mother became Fort Worth’s “native son” in the truest sense of that term. The city virtually adopted him. City fathers such as W. T. “Tom” Waggoner and Samuel Burk Burnett called him friend and he always had a special place in his heart for the town even while making a home among his people in Oklahoma. How Quanah Parker came to be Fort Worth’s Native Son is one of our city’s great stories. It is the remarkable story of a man straddling two cultures, alternately embraced and rejected by both, who in the end helped heal the wounds of war and hatred. He was born and grew up in the world of the fearsome Comanches but died in the white man’s world after making peace with his people’s longtime enemies. His given name, Quanah, was Native American and the only name he needed among his father’s people. Years later he added the surname Parker as acknowledgment of the white half of his ancestry. The two names symbolized the two worlds that Quanah Parker lived in. ChapTeR 8 Quanah Parker: Fort Worth’s Adopted Native Son Fort Worth Characters / 150 Quanah is an elusive historical figure. Take his birth date, for instance . He once wrote a friend offhandedly that he thought he had been born “about 1850,” yet the subsequent chronology of his life does not fit someone born in 1850. The authoritative New Handbook of Texas states that he was born “about 1845.” Various biographers have placed the date as early as 1845 and as late as 1852. There is no way of telling for certain since the Plains Indians relied on oral history to preserve their history, not written records, so there is no documentation for any of the suggested dates. However, 1845 seems most likely based on the chronology of his subsequent life.1 By Quanah’s own account, as related years later to Charles Goodnight , he was born in a Comanche tepee in the shadow of Oklahoma’s Wichita Mountains. His mother was Cynthia Ann Parker, who had been captured in May 1836 by a large Comanche-Kiowa-Caddo war party in a raid on the Parker family compound at the headwaters of the Navasota River in central Texas. She was nine years old at the time and would not see her family again for twenty-four years. The The A. F. Corning daguerreotype of Cynthia Ann Parker and daughter, taken in Fort Worth in December 1860, is one of only two known images of Cynthia Ann. The miserable woman staring into the camera with her hair chopped off—a traditional Comanche sign of mourning—believed her husband and sons were dead and her bleak future was as a “captive” of the whites. (Author’s collection.) Quanah Parker: Fort Worth’s Adopted Native Son / 151 raiders escaped with five white captives, including Cynthia Ann and her brother John. The Comanche might have ransomed her back to her people, which is what happened to the other four captives, but they admired her toughness and her striking blue eyes. So they adopted her into the Quahade (“Antelope-eaters”) band, giving her the name Naduah (“Someone Found”).2 A few years later, Chief Peta Nocona (or Noconi) took her as his wife. According to Comanche lore, Naduah was the only wife Peta Nocona ever had, an extremely rare departure from tribal custom. Although not a “Boston marriage,” the term then current for a proper church or civil ceremony, theirs proved a long and happy union on both sides. Cynthia Ann grew into womanhood thoroughly assimilated into the culture of those who called themselves Numunuh (“the People”), and the three children she had by him were all raised in the Comanche way. Quanah’s given name translates as “the Eagle,” and indeed he would soar higher than any other of his people in Native American history. By 1860, he had two siblings, a ten-year-old brother, Pee-nah, usually translated as...