Overall, he encouraged the tribe to learn the vast majority of the white man’s ways. He also served as a judge on the tribal court and established the Comanche police force. For the next 25 years, he provided leadership - promoting self-sufficiency and self-reliance on the reservation - building schools, creating ranching operations, and planting crops. Though most of the Indians found the transition to reservation life extremely difficult, Quanah adapted so easily that he was soon made chief. Quanah was wounded in what is referred to as The Second Battle of Adobe Walls and within a year, Parker and his band of Quahadis surrendered and moved to the Kiowa – Comanche reservation in southwestern Oklahoma. The buffalo camp, where only 28 men resided, fought off the Indians with their superior weapons and the warriors were forced to retreat. Though Quanah had recruited some 700 warriors from not only his own tribe but also that of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa, the attack on the Adobe Walls camp, occurring on June 27, 1874, was in vain. However, when numerous buffalo hunters began to invade their hunting grounds, Quanah, along with Comanche medicine man Isa-tai, sought to rid those who were decimating their chief source of survival and attacked their camp at Adobe Walls. In 18, several attempts were made by the Fourth United States Cavalry to subdue them but failed. When the Quahadis refused to sign the Medicine Lodge Treaty in 1867 they became fugitives, continuing their buffalo hunting way of life and sometimes raiding white settlements in the Texas Panhandle. Quanah joined the Destanyuka band of the Comanche, but later formed his own band called the Quahadi, which eventually grew to become one of the largest and most notorious Comanche bands on the Great Plains. However, before his death, he told Quanah of his mother’s capture from the whites and with that, other tribesmen soon began to call him a half-breed and before long, the group split. After his wife’s recapture, Quanah’s father was a broken and bitter man and soon died. After 24 years of living with the Indians, Quanah’s mother was recaptured in the Battle of Pease River by Texas Rangers. Quanah was born around 1845 to Chief Peta Nocona and Cynthia Ann Parker, a white captive of the Comanche, near the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma. In fact, the different nations or bands within the Comanche political structure made their own policies and decisions based on their own needs, without any sort of central authority like a president or a king.The last Chief of the Quahadi Comanche, Parker was both a major resistor to white settlers, as well as a leader in the tribe’s adjustment to reservation life. While there were at times a single "great chief" acknowledged by the others, it was not a formal position and didn't change the fact that the Comanches governed themselves via a council where representatives had a vote, not any sort of monarchy. These bands would then combine informally into a tribe or nation, but this was based on mutual need or advantage.Ĭomanche government was therefore very council-based, with elders gathering on a formal and informal basis to discuss issues and come to decisions. Sometimes these bands could be hundreds strong, and the elder patriarch was usually referred to as a chief. As historian Thomas Kavanagh explains, the Comanche Nation was divided into "bands," which were centered on a patriarch and usually comprised of extended relatives. Despite having a few famous Chiefs of their own, the Comanches were not this organized or unified.
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