From the mobile desk of E. R. Harris: The High Plains—where the Comanches made their last stand

Picture the silhouette of a dozen Comanches on top of this ridge line.

Ahh . . . the Southwest. You can feel the shift as you drive East, up out of the Southern Sierras, across the southern tip of Nevada, and on into central Arizona. Each grade summited reveals bigger and wider skies. Puffy white clouds, perfectly spaced, become woven into the endless blue quilt above. For us Coastal types, the Pacific Ocean is unexpectedly replaced by the infinite nature of the sky. Red cap rock escarpments begin to funnel the highway from one dusty stretch of open land to another. Within the increasingly dramatic landscape you begin to spy delicate hoodoos residing in desolate, shaded canyons. In between the geologic wonders green creosote bushes dot the tanned tracks of barren ground, which seem to stretch out forever in every direction.

For me, this was a special trip for a few reasons. Obviously, with a pandemic and the uncertainty of what the future may bring, to escape from the monotony of being on lockdown for many months was foremost. To be able to camp and bask in the magic of the outdoors was immeasurably relieving. But the trip was seminal in another fashion: it just so happens I have been reading up on the Native Americans’ final resistance to the White Usurpers coming at them in waves from the East in the mid to late 1800’s.

It was an ugly, ugly time in American history, arguably the darkest time, and that’s coming from a White Male perspective. What it must have been like for the beaten Eastern tribes to walk the ‘Trail of Tears’ from their homeland onto the dustbowl reservations in the midwest, to see one’s culture and people being systematically eradicated . . . it’s just impossible to imagine. Horrifying. History can be like that.

All of the events of the last stand of the Comanches (and Kiowas and a few associated hold-out tribes) took place in the southwestern states that I was traveling through on my roadtrip, so as I read and researched more about the topic, my surroundings no doubt enhanced my intrigue on the subject, making it all seem to come alive in the very landscape that my eyes were taking in.

“Across . . . the Rio Grande-O . . . Across . . . that lazy river.” - Bobby Weir

After listening to Joe Rogan interview S. C. Gwynne, an award-winning author and historian, who wrote Empire of the Summer Moon about Quanah Parker, the last war chief of the holdout Comanche tribes, I was sucked in. The story is so fascinating and is such a central part of our infamous history as a nation, that I feel I must bring it to my reader’s consciousness, in an attempt to provoke their emotions and opinions on the subject. Although the story has already been reproduced in many, many formats (from newspaper exposes, to TV serials, to movies, to books, to plays, to academic papers and even lectures), I am anxious to see director Derek Cianfrance’s post-modern take on it.

Here is the central notion that grabbed me: as a child growing up in the 70’s and 80’s I learned about the great ‘Thanksgiving Lie’ at an early age. Maybe my perspective was formed by growing up in the Bay Area, a liberal bastion in the world today, but I found it very sad and tragic that “my” people—White people—decimated the Indian tribes, forced them on reservations, and killed all the buffalo herds. So, like many educated and informed Americans, I grew up knowing the truth behind our Nation’s dark history, from slavery, to the extermination of the native peoples, to the utter devastation of Civil War. Death. Killing. Rape. Torture. Disease War Fare. There’s an enormous amount of baggage that comes along with the founding of a “Great Nation”. Ask the Romans. The Greeks. The Ottomans. On and on it goes as far back as you want to trace it. But that is not what I want to explore, specifically. After all the tragedy of history stands there, recorded in memoriam, anytime we want to be reminded of our flawed human condition. What I want to explore is the concept of cultural imprint.

By cultural imprint what I mean is the resulting final product of HOW an individual human being is raised, and consequently, how they turn out to really be. What belief systems and values was the person raised with? What kind of community, what kind of lessons were they taught, what kind of environment reared them? When sociologists study human behavior in regard to one’s upbringing, there can be no mistaking that what matters more than any other determining factor is specifically HOW a person was raised. That is what makes the story of Cynthia Ann Parker (and her son Quanah) so curious and such a good case study for this concept of cultural imprint.

One of the many things that brought on the White migrations was prospecting.

Put very simply: which life is better—living as an Indian in a nomadic tribe, or living as a law-abiding citizen of the United States? If a given person is given a choice between one or the other—which way of life will they choose? What if they have been exposed to both—does that change their decision?

Cynthia Ann Parker, at the age of 8, suffered through the horrifying events of a raid on her family fort, placed idiotically in the middle of hostile Comanche territory. I will not speak to the atrocities the warriors committed on the Parker family, you can read the grim details in the book, but suffice it to say that any child who witnesses and goes through that kind of trauma is affected forever.

And yet, the young White girl is adopted into the tribe as one of their own, reared in the exact same fashion, marries a prominent war chief, and raises their children. One of which is Quanah Parker, who I will discuss below. This circumstance of events—a captured White girl adopted and fully ingratiated into the tribe—was not uncommon, but what makes the story so impressionable was that she was “recaptured” by Texas Rangers when she was in her thirties. Afterwards she was forced to go live with her surviving White family members, who stuffed her into clothing, and like a rare doll, displayed Cynthia Ann as a scheme for earning money and notoriety for themselves. The Parkers who kept her were literally abductors, because she tried to escape every single day, self-masticating herself frequently from the agony she felt because of her separation from her tribe and her sons. For her, it became a waking nightmare, and she ended up starving herself to death after her (also captive) daughter died from a White disease picked up from all of the visitors no doubt.

There can be no refuting the reality for Cynthia Ann Parker—she wanted nothing to do with being a White citizen, and was desperate to return to her nomadic tribe. Despite the hardships of such a life, she would have rather died than sleep in a feather bed, be bathed with warm water and have hundreds of gawking visitors trying to take a picture of “The White Squaw”.

Red hoodoos, white puffy clouds, pale blue sky, and green juniper and creosote. Classic.

It’s such a tragic story. But it gets more tragic, obviously, as the subject is LITERALLY about the very end of Native American hegemony. But I’ll skip the details on the disgusting finality of forcing the last wild Comanche tribes onto the reservations. Now I would like to bring to light Quanah Parker’s contradictory experience to that of his mother’s.

Let’s make it clear—it’s proven Quanah had killed (and more than likely raped and tortured) many, many innocent Whites and twice that number of rival Native American tribes. He was no angel. But he was born into a warfare culture that was hundreds of years old, and his people’s way of life was being systematically removed by the tide of White soldiers flowing across the Plains to eradicate them. The Comanches had not only dominated the weaker rival tribes, but also expelled—in order: the Spanish, the Mexicans, the Texans and early settler paramilitary operations.

But what is so curious about Quanah is the about-face that he eventually made. He saw a vision, realized the bitter truth—that there was no stopping the White onslaught without complete annihilation of his people—and succumbed fully to the White way. He became a non-violent ‘citizen’ of the United States (he couldn’t vote, obviously). Some could argue Quanah embodied the finest example of a neighbor: a man who was honorable, worked hard, helped others, and was an activist in his community. He shifted his desire to be the most powerful war chief, through violence and physical dominance, to winning on the political and economic battlefield, through shrewd negotiation and mental acuity. He accumulated great wealth, but ended up giving most of it away to help his neglected, starving people on the reservations.

So we have two cases here: Cynthia Ann made no bones about her preference to live the ancient way, whereas Quanah adopted the modern White lifestyle. The cultural imprint of the Comanche way was so thoroughly part of the fabric of Cynthia Ann, that she could not adapt, and it ultimately caused her untimely death. While Quanah, one could argue, had an even stronger Comanche cultural imprint (because he had not spent his first eight years living in the White man’s world), and yet was able to adapt when he was forced to stop living in the ancient way. It could be argued that he even thrived compared to most White men, despite his clear disadvantage in terms of opportunity for economic and political advancement.

I can imagine Quanah and his warriors drawing in soldiers here for an ambush.

As I watched the red, yellow and brown landscapes on my roadtrip, and took hikes into the canyons and amongst the rocks, I tried to think about the experience of what it must have been like to be an Indian during this White Plague of the late 1800’s. The fear and anger and confusion that the tribal leaders must have faced when trying to figure out a way to preserve their way of life. As for the Comanches, they had every reason to fight—they had already dispelled all rival tribes, the Spanish, the Mexicans and the Texans—without ever losing territory—but I still cannot ever accept their cruel and despicable treatment of their enemies. What’s bizarre to me is that Comanches were known to be so loving and nurturing and playful amongst themselves, when safely tucked away in tipi encampments, which makes it that much more difficult to come to terms with the sadistic violence their warriors perpetrated on other tribes and the initial White settlers of their land.

Then I think about the final methods used by the US cavalry to (for once and for all) bring Quanah’s tribe in: shooting all of their wild horses they captured, and slaughtering all of the buffalo, skinning them for their hides and leaving the rest to rot to waste on the Plains. Although this kind of butchery was mostly confined to animals—not innocent women and children—it’s still disgusting, and while the Natives were not usually tortured and raped by the White soldiers, there were plenty of Comanche women and children who perished in raids and because of starvation in the aftermath of the destruction of their homes.

It’s just so gross. Human nature scares me sometimes. But I know there has to be a moral compass within us, somewhere—there has to be—where we can stop justifying violence to women and children as “necessary” tactics during war fare. White Settlers west of the 98th meridian, during the times when the Plains were still dominated by the Comanches, were absolute idiots to put their families at risk by homesteading there. So, yes the victims were innocent, but the men who knowingly put their loved ones in harm’s way are partly to blame in those vicious crimes. Still, it’s hard to ever reconcile in my mind what terrible things Comanche warriors did to their victims. What we cannot ever forget is not to lump all Native Americans in with the the Plains Indians way of life.

The duality of life, embodied perfectly by this conifer in Flagstaff, Arizona.

The multiplicity of belief-systems and unique attributes of the Native American tribes that used to inhabit our country is bewildering. According to Indian Nations of North America, the majority were NOT bloodthirsty war faring tribes like a few of the Plains Indians tended to be. Therefore, using a moral compass, one cannot argue that all of the indigenous people needed to be “changed” from their ways in order to protect the innocent. To worship God. To toil in obscurity with little or no opportunity to thrive in an utterly foreign culture, stripped of their ability to live in the ancient way.

I sigh as I sit and stare up at the mountains above Taos, New Mexico. So many desperate lives were won and lost during those dark, volatile times of the mid to late 1800’s. When the southwest was in a tug of war between indigenous peoples and foreign nations come to displace them. When guns and killing and terrorism became the modus operandi.

It’s hard to face the naked truth of White, patriarchal, rigged, power structures when you ARE a white, male. But I must honestly assess the present through the lens of history, in an attempt to be better informed on the reality of the world I am living in. I’m glad there are institutions built over time to protect the innocent, but they will always need fixing, readdressing, reassessing, and ultimately, changing. We must continue to apply a moral compass in our actions and make sure we are trying to represent ourselves as a true leader for democracy and for doing what is right. To determine what is right takes many, many things, including perspective, and a full spectrum of feedback. This process of discovering moral direction is ever-changing, and this amorphous quality is what makes it so important that we all take the time to have these conversations, to listen to others and come to consensus. That is democracy. It came too late for the indigenous peoples of the world. Let’s make sure it now comes to those who suffer from systemic racism.