My Visit to Quanah Parker's and Charles Goodnight's Houses
My friend Brandon and I, along with our fathers-in-law, went to Cache, Oklahoma and visited Quanah Parker’s house, called Star House. It’s called Star House because the roof has these large stars that were painted onto the shingles. The stars are covered by a tarp in this picture.
Cache is in Comanche County, OK.
That’s me on the right, with my friend Brandon Broyles (left). Brandon and I have done some podcasts together about theology on my Laudable Audible podcast channel, which you can listen to on Spotify’s Podcast and Apple’s Podcast.
The Star House is located on private land owned by a guy named Wayne Gibson. It’s tucked away in a field, on the edge of an old overgrown amusement park, which has other very old houses that are overgrown on the grounds, along with a rollercoaster ride and other amusement park rides that are almost undetectable given that they’re so overgrown with weeds, bushes, tall grass, and trees. It was kind of surreal walking through this amusement park with rides and little houses that are disappearing into the greenery of nature.
Here’s S.C. Gwynne, author of Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, The Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, discussing Quanah Parker’s house and Mr. Gwynne’s visit to the house.
Star House is looking pretty rough these days.
Quanah Parker was the son of Cynthia Ann Parker, who was kidnapped by the Comanches when she was 9 years old in what is now Limestone County, Texas, in 1836. Quanah went on to be the last Comanche chief of the Comanches in their pre-reservation existence, when they were still living in their ancestral ways and freedoms.
So here’s some of what happened:
In time, once Cynthia Ann Parker grew up, she was eventually married to Peta Nocona, and they had Quanah Parker, a boy named Pee-nah, and a girl named Prairie Flower.
The Comanches were a raiding and nomadic tribe, and their territory was named Comancheria by the Spanish, which consisted of about 250,000 square miles. The Comanches were an offshoot of the Shoshones in Wyoming, and eventually made their way south through Colorado and into Texas, into the Llano Estacado area. They encountered horses, which changed the game for them and their dominance among the other tribes in the annals of history. As S.C. Gwynne noted, they were the most powerful tribe in American history given their horsemanship and marksmanship while riding.
Once the federal government sent the federal army to round them up and put them onto a reservation, the “western frontier” was finally over for all intents and purposes.
The Comanches almost single-handedly made the western frontier an impenetrable barrier to settler expansion by sheer guerrilla warfare tactics in their raids on settlers. They terrorized the settlers so sufficiently along the western frontier that the frontier actually started retreating back to the east at one point by about 100 miles.
The Texas Revolution lasted one year. The Civil War lasted four years. It took over 40 years to finally “defeat” the Comanches - the last Comanche raid being in 1875.
The Comanches were used to winning, they had beaten everyone they encountered for a very long time. They beat the Apache, the Tonkawa, the Spanish, the Mexicans, and the Texas Rangers initially.
What changed the balance of power for the Rangers was the Colt revolver pistol. But as effective as the Rangers were in any given skirmish with Comanches, it never amounted to anything like victory over the Comanche nation. It’s like special forces fighting the Taliban. They’ll win in any given fight, but the Taliban remains. The most that could be done was to diminish their power and put it under the authority of a different government. Which is what happened once the Comanches were relegated to reservation life in 1875.
In 1861, when Peta Nocona led a Comanche raiding party through what is now Jacksboro and Parker County, they killed 23 people in 2 days, which included a settler named Martha Sherman.
Here’s Martha Sherman’s story as told by John Graves in his book Goodbye to a River:
They rode up to the cabin while the Shermans were at dinner on November 27, 1860 - dinner in rural Texas then and up into my young years being the noontime meal. There were half a hundred of them, painted, devil-ugly in look and mood. It was the year after the humiliating march up across the Red under good, dead Neighbors; the frontier country was not yet strange to The People, nor were they yet convinced they had lost it. They wanted rent-pay for it in horses, and trophies, and blood, and boasting-fuel for around the prairie campfires in the years to come. Horses they had taken in plenty - 300 or so of them by the time they reached the Shermans' - and they had just lanced John Brown to death among his ponies to the east, and the day before had raped and slaughtered and played catch-ball with babies' bodies at the Landmans' and the Gages' to the north.
Though the Shermans did not know about any of that, their visitors lacked the aspect that a man would want to see in his luncheon guests - even a sharper frontiersman than Ezra Sherman, who, in that particular time and place, with a wife and four kids for a responsibility, had failed to furnish himself with firearms.
The oldest boy, Mrs. Sherman's by an earlier husband who had died, said: "Papa…"
But by the time Ezra Sherman turned around, they were inside the one-room cabin, a half-dozen of them, filling it with hard tarnished-copper bodies and the flash of flat eyes and a smell of wood smoke and horse sweat and leather and wild armpits and crotches.
Behind them, through the door, were the urgent jostle and gabble and snickering of the rest.
"God's Heaven!" Sherman said, gripping the table's edge. Martha Sherman said: "Don't show nothin'. Don't scare."
She had come to the frontier young with a brother and his family, but even if she'd only come the year before she'd have known more about it than her husband. There was sense in her, and force. Her youngest started bawling at the Indians; she took his arm and squeezed it hard until he shushed, looking up the while into the broad face, slash-painted diagonally in scarlet and black, of the big one who moved grinning toward the table. He wore two feathers slanting up from where a braid fanned into the hair of his head, and held a short lance.
"Hey," he said. "Hey," Ezra Sherman answered. The Indian said something. "No got whisky," Ezra Sherman said. "No got horse. Want 'lasses? Good 'lasses."
"You're fixin' to have us kilt," his wife said, and stood up. "Git!" she told the big Indian.
He grinned still, and gabbled at her. She shook her head and pointed to the door, and behind her heard the youngest begin again to cry. The Indian's gabbed changed timbre; it was Spanish now, she knew, but she didn't understand that either.
"Git out!" she repeated.
"Hambre," he said, rubbing his bare belly and pointing to the bacon and greens and cornbread and buttermilk on the table.
"No, you ain't," she said, and snatched up a willow broom that was leaned against the wall. But his eye caught motion to the left and she spun, swinging the broom up and down and whack against the ear of the lean, tall, bowlegged one who had hold of her bolt of calico. She swung again and again, driving him back with his hands raised, and then one of the hands was at a knife in his belt, and Two-feathers's lance came down like a fence between them. Her broom hit it and bounced up. The three of them stood there… Two-feathers was laughing. The lean Indian wasn't. The calico lay on the floor, trampled; she bent and picked it up, and her nervous fingers plucked away its wrinkles and rolled it again into a bolt.
"Martha, you're gonna rile 'em," her husband said.
"Be quiet," she told him without looking away from Two-feathers's laughing eyes.
"Good," the big Indian's mouth said in English from out of the black-and-red smear. With his hand he touched the long chestnut hair at her ear; she tossed her head away from the touch, and he laughed again. "Mucha Mujer," he said.
The lean one jabbered at him spittingly.
Martha Sherman's oldest said calmly: "That's red hair."
It was. In the cabin's windowless gloom she had not noticed, but now she saw that the lean one's dirty braids glinted auburn, and that his eyes, flickering from her to the authoritative big one, were green like her own. Finally he nodded sulkily to something that Two-feathers said. Two-feathers waved the other warriors back and turned to where Ezra Sherman stood beside the dinner table.
"No hurt," he said, and jerked his head toward the door. "Vamoose" "Yes," Ezra Sherman said, and stuck out his hand. "Friend. Good fellow."
The big Indian glanced ironically at the hand and touched it with his own. "Vamoose, " he repeated.
Ezra Sherman said: "You see?" He don't mean no trouble. I bet if I dip up some molasses they'll just…"
"He means go," Martha Sherman said levelly. "You bring Alfie."
"Go where?"
"Come on!" she said, and the force of her utterance bent him down and put his callus-crusted farmer's hands beneath the baby's arms and straightened him and pulled him along behind her as she walked, holding the hands of the middle children, out the door into the stir and murmur of the big war party. It was misting lightly, grayly…. The solemn oldest boy came last, and as he left the cabin he was still looking back at the green-eyed, lean, redheaded Comanche.
Two-feathers shouted from the door and the gabble died, and staring straight ahead Martha Sherman led her family across the bare wet dirt of the yard and through the gate, past ponies' tossing hackamored heads and the bristle of bows and muskets and lances and the flat dark eyes of fifty Comanches. She took the road toward the creek. In a minute they were in brush, out of sight of the house, and they heard the voices begin loud again behind them. Martha Sherman began to trot, dragging the children.
"Where we goin' to?" Ezra Sherman said.
"Pottses'."
He said: "I don't see how you could git so ugly about a little old hank of cloth and then leave the whole house with-"
"Don't talk, Ezra," she said. "Move. Please, please move." But then there was the thudding rattle of unshod hooves on the road behind them, and a hard-clutching hand in her chestnut hair, and a ring of ponies dancing around them, with brown riders whose bodies gave and flexed with the dancing like joined excrescences of the ponies' spines.
Before she managed to twist her head and see him, she knew it was the redheaded one who had her; he gabbled contemptuously at Ezra Sherman, and with the musket in this other hand pointed down toward the creek. The pony shied at the motion, yanking her off balance. She did not fight now, knowing it pointless or worse.
"Durn you, let her be!" Ezra Sherman yelled, moving, but a sharp lancepoint pricked his chest two inches from the baby's nose and he stopped, looking up.
"Go on, Ezra," his wife said. "They'll let you go."
Ain't right," he said. The lancepoint jabbed; he backed away a half-foot. "Go on."
He went, trailing stumbling children, and the last she saw of them was the back-turned face of her oldest, but one of the horsemen made a plunging run at him, and he turned and followed the family.… The redhead's pony spun and started dancing back up the road. The hand jerked her hair, and she went half down, and a hoof caught her ankle; then she was running to keep from dragging. Snow was drifting horizontally against the chinaberries she had planted around her dooryard, though it was not cold; she saw finally that it was feathers from her bed, which one of them had ripped open and was shaking in the doorway while others laughed. In a shed some of them had found the molasses barrel and had axed its top and were drinking from tin cups and from their hands, throwing the ropy liquid over each other with yells. The old milk cow came loping and bawling grotesquely from behind the house, A Comanche astride her neck, three arrows through her flopping bag….
Deftly, without loosening his grip, the redhead swung his leg across his pony's neck and slid to the ground and in one long strong motion, like laying out a rope or a blanket, threw her flat. Two of the others took her legs, pulling them apart. She kicked. The flame-pain of a lance knifed into her ribs and through her chest and out the back and into the ground and was withdrawn; she felt each inch of its thrust and retreat, and in a contraction of shock there relaxed elsewhere, and her legs were clamped out wide, and the lean redhead had let go of her hair and stood above her, working at his waistband.
Spread-eagled, she twisted her head and saw Two-feathers a few yards away, her big Bible in his hands, watching. Her eyes spoke, and maybe her mouth; he shrugged and turned toward the shed where the molasses barrel stood, past a group that was trying to light fire against the web cabin wall…
The world was a wild yell, and the redhead went first, and the third one, grunting, had molasses smeared over his chest and bed feathers stuck in it, and after that she didn't count; though trying hard she could not slip over into the blackness that lay just beyond an uncrossable line. Still conscious, and that part over, she knew when one on horseback held her arms up and another worked a steel-pointed arrow manually, slowly, into her body under her shoulderblade, and left it there. Knew, too, when the knife made its hot circumcision against the bone of her skull, and when a horseman messed his fingers into her long hair again and she was dragging beside his panicked, snorting pony. But the hair was good and held, and finally a stocky warrior had to stand with a foot on each of her shoulders as she lay in the plowed field before the house, and peel off her scalp by main force. For a time after that they galloped back and forth across her body, yelling-one thing she recalled with a crystallinity that the rest of it lost, or never had, was that no hoof touched her-and shot two or three more arrows into her, and went away. She lived for four days (another writer says three, and another still says one, adding the detail that she gave birth to a dead child; take your pick), tended by neighbor women, and if those days were anything but a continuing fierce dream for her, no record of it has come down.
In delirium, she kept saying she wouldn't have minded half so much if it hadn't been for that red hair….
The oldest boy had quit his stepfather and had circled back through the brush and had watched it all from hiding. No record, either, states how he felt about Comanches afterward, or the act of love, or anything.
It seems clear that The People were good haters. So were the whites, though, and that was a year before a war unconnected with Indians was to draw away many of the tough, young ones.
Martha Sherman is buried in Willow Springs cemetery in Weatherford.
After this raid, given the atrocities of what happened to these victims, there was an immediate abandoning of frontier houses, and a long train of covered wagons headed east, back to Weatherford, Fort Worth, or beyond.
As S.C. Gwynne put it “all hell broke lose”.
Charles Goodnight, who was in his early twenties at the time and living in the cabin that’s pictured below (which is north of Weatherford on land owned by of a friend of mine), was outraged at the atrocities Martha Sherman and other settlers had endured in the raid, and rode through the night, enlisting local volunteers from the settlements to help track the Comanches. A hard rain was falling during and after the attack, which allowed tracking the Comanches, who had around 300 horses with them that they’d stolen in the raiding spree.
They tracked the Comanches to the Pease River. But realizing they were outnumbered, they turned back and came to Weatherford and surrounding areas, and enlisted the help of the Texas Rangers (led by Sul Ross), federal soldiers, and other volunteers from the area, and then made an organized attack on the Comanches about a month after Martha Sherman’s attack. This is called The Battle of Pease River. The day before the battle, the Comanches had killed a young boy named Hiram Fowler that they’d kidnapped in the raid. His bones were found a year later.
The battle site is on private property. But here is the monument commemorating it.
Along the way to Pease River, Goodnight found Martha Sherman’s bible, which now appears to be lost to history. The Comanches would use paper to pack the inside of their shields to make them more impenetrable. There’s a story of Texas Rangers finding the pages from a book about the history of the Roman Empire inside a warrior’s shield, which they read that night around the campfire under the stars of west Texas.
During the Battle of Pease River they discovered that Cynthia Ann Parker was one of the tribe, so they “recaptured” her, 24 years after she was first kidnapped by the Comanches. In reality they kidnapped her, because it became apparent that she didn’t want to live with her Parker kin, given that every chance she got she’d bolt on foot trying to escape and run back to her Comanche people. I suspect the Parkers thought it inconceivable that Cynthia Ann preferred the Comanche way of life, and thought that eventually she’d ‘come to her senses’.
Quanah was about 15 years old when this battle occurred and his mom and his younger sister, Prairie Flower, were taken by Sul Ross and the Texas Rangers. Some accounts say Peta Nocona was killed in this battle, whereas other accounts claim otherwise. Quanah and his brother rode away from the battle to safety, but he never saw his mom or little sister again. Prairie Flower passed away at 5 or 6 years old from pneumonia and the flu. Cynthia Ann ended up spending the rest of her life with Parker relatives in a new kind of captivity.
Martha Sherman was the great great grandmother of John R. Erickson, who wrote the The Adventures of Hank the Cowdog books. He wrote a book about his family and what happened to Martha Sherman called Prairie Gothic. Mr. Erickson and John Graves (who wrote the account of Martha Sherman above) met in 1973, and would exchange letters, which I would bet would be worth reading.
John R. Erickson gives an interesting account of how Martha Sherman and Cynthia Ann Parker were connected:
There is also a series of coincidences that run through the Sherman episode, weaving an intriguing tapestry out of the lives of Martha Sherman and Cynthia Ann Parker. Both came from families that were bold enough to settle on the edge of the Texas frontier, both families moved to Texas from Illinois, (coincidentally, so did Charlie Goodnight’s family), and in 1860 Cynthia Ann and Martha were close to the same age. Both had dramatic, life-changing encounters with the Comanches, and in most accounts, Mrs. Sherman was killed by Cynthia Ann’s husband, Peta Nocona. Both women suffered the death of a baby and both left sons who later appeared in West Texas - Joe Sherman and Quanah Parker.
Oddly, Martha Sherman was buried in Parker County which had been named in honor of Cynthia Ann’s uncle Isaac, a member of the Third, Fourth, Sixth and Seventh Congresses of the Republic of Texas, and a member of the first State Constitutional Convention in Texas….
Odder still, Martha Sherman and Cynthia Ann Parker were actually related by marriage. Mrs. Charles Haydon, Martha’s granddaughter, recalled “Cynthia Ann Parker was a second cousin of my father on his father’s side. The two families all lived in Illinois and moved to Texas along about the same time.”
Also, if Peta Nocona was one of the Comanche’s who raped Martha Sherman, then, he knew both women in a biblical sense.
In the end, when all was said and done, it’s perhaps worth noting that there wasn’t a cattle rancher or settler, except for the most ardent Indian hater, that didn’t get at least a little sad at the subjugation of such a free and powerful people:
It is impossible to read deeply in American frontier history without wincing at the way things turned out for the Comanches. Even the men who fought them, the Charles Goodnights and the Billy Dixons, admired their courage and, in old age, blinked back tears on seeing them reduced to wards of government.
Post reservation, Quanah became friends with guys like Charles Goodnight and Burk Burnett, and even Teddy Roosevelt. It was Quanah’s cattlemen friends who built Star House for him.
The friendship of Charles Goodnight and Quanah Parker is one of those ironies of history, given that it was because Charles Goodnight pursued and tracked Peta Nocona (Quanah’s dad) and the Comanches back to Pease River, which led to the capture of Quanah’s mom and sister, who he never laid eyes on again after he rode away from that battle as a youngster, and by some accounts, got Quanah’s dad killed at the battle. Because of Peta Nocona’s raiding on Parker County, and the subsequent justice meted out by the Texas Rangers, due to Charles Goodnight’s tracking and locating them, Quanah lost his whole family in a single day except for his little brother. The sins of the father….