WHO KILLED
THE CHIEF?

While this was the first time she had been identified by name, it was not the first time she had been recognized as a white captive. In 1851, when she would have been 18, a blanket trader in a Quohada Comanche camp recognized her as white. He asked her in secret if she wished to go back to her white family. According to his statement "…she shook her head in a sorrowful negative, and pointed to her little naked barbarians sporting at her feet, and to the great, greasy, lazy buck sleeping in the shade near at hand, the locks of a score of scalps dangling from his belt…."

The 'little naked barbarians' had to be her sons Quanah and his younger brother, whose name has come down as 'Pecos' and—for some unfathomable reason—'Peanuts.' Since we know that Quanah was about four years older than his brother, and in 1851 Pecos was old enough to be 'sporting at (his mother's) feet,' Quanah had to be born about 1845.

As soon as the fight was over Ross detailed two men, one of whom was the later-famous Charlie Goodnight, to cut for sign and see if there were any escapees. West of the camp Goodnight came upon the tracks of two horses. They had been ridden away at a leisurely pace until they reached the top of a hill just west of the camp. At that point the riders apparently jettisoned all baggage and left at a dead run. Goodnight followed the tracks for about 50 miles, until he saw in the distance an encampment which he estimated had at least a thousand Indians in it. He returned to Ross with this information and Ross wisely decided not to pursue the matter any farther.

Lawrence Sullivan Ross went on to become Adjutant General of Texas, Governor of Texas, and president of what was then known as Texas A&M College. A&M's honors drill team, the Ross Volunteers, is named for him and is the honor guard for all Texas governors. Sul Ross State University in Alpine, established as Sul Ross State Teachers' College, likewise bears his name.



Ross believed, until he died, that he had killed the Quohada chief Peta Nocona, for whom the town of Nocona is named. During his lifetime no one contradicted this, not even Quanah. Quanah Parker admired Ross a great deal. Ross provided Quanah with a copy of the only known photograph of his mother and young sister. Ross also arranged to have the bodies of Cynthia Ann Parker/Nadua and her daughter Prairie Flower, whose name was rendered phonetically as 'Texanne,' exhumed and removed to the Comanche cemetery at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

Ross, indeed, had a better reason to claim the kill than did the interpreter. The shotgun blast only hastened what could have been no more than a few minutes away.

There the story rested until 9 July 1896. On that day, in a speech in Quanah, Texas, the town named for him, Quanah Parker stated:

"Texas history books tell General Ross kill my father; he no kill him. I want to get that straight up. No kill my father! He not there. I see my father die, two-three year after. He sick. I there. I see him die."

This surprised not only Charlie Goodnight, but John Wesley of Foard County. Wesley, in 1880, acquired the land upon which the fight had taken place, along Mule Creek. In 1918 he wrote "I became acquainted with Quanah Parker in 1882 or 1883 and met him quite often in Vernon where he and members of his tribe came to trade. He was very friendly and wanted to know all about his kinfolks in Parker County. He asked me to visit him at Fort Sill and I in return asked him to visit me, but he said he never went to Mule Creek because his father was killed there and his mother and brother (actually it was his sister) were captured and carried off. He said he never wanted to see the place."

Both Cynthia Ann Parker and her daughter died in 1870. This was three years before Quanah became well known to the whites as a Comanche chief and five years before the final defeat of Quanah's Noconis, the name he gave his own band of Quohadas. His mother never knew her sons had survived the Mule Creek fight. According to her neighbors "She thought her sons were lost on the prairie after she was captured. She would take a knife and slash her breasts until they bled and then put the blood on some tobacco and burn it and cry for her lost boys." Obviously, then the woman Nadua and her sons were in the camp at Mule Creek when the fight started. Where was her husband, Peta Nocona?

In a 1910 letter to Charlie Goodnight, written shortly before the chief died, Quanah said "…when the Peas river fight took place my father with the main body of Indians was about seventy or eighty miles away with his Indian wife my brother and myself. He knew nothing of the fight until the two survivors, of the last named fight returned to the camp and informed him of the great disastor which had befallen his people." (Spelling & punctuation from the original.)

Quanah further wrote "From the best information I have, I was born about 1850, on Elk Creek in the Wichita Mountains…I remained with my father from this time until his death which occurred two or three years later, I was with him and saw him die and he was buried near the Antelope Hills in what I now believe is in Lipscond (Lipscomb) County near the south bank of the Canadian…Before the death of my father, he told me my mother was a white woman, that he took her into captivity from central or east Texas, when she was a child…what I state in regard to the death of my father is from my own personal knowledge…." (Spelling & punctuation from the original.)

Historian John Henry Brown had already disputed the identity of the chief killed at Mule Creek, stating he was told the man's name was Mo-he-ew. Quanah wrote "….while I was too young to remember the chief it is likely that Brown was correct…."

Quanah, though, was not 'too young to remember.' That 1850 date is too late for his birth. He was about 15 or 16 at the time of the Mule Creek fight. His mother slashed her breasts and burned bloodstained tobacco—a Comanche mourning ritual—in memory of her two sons, who had been in the camp at Mule Creek and whom she feared had died there.

Quanah himself wrote "There was born to her three children myself being the oldest, a brother who died at an early age, named Peanuts and my sister who was an infant in her arms when she was captured by Gov. Ross men…." (Spelling & punctuation from the original.) What sons was the woman Nadua mourning, if not Quanah and Pecos?

Baldwin Parker, Quanah's son, stated to George Hunt, an early anthropologist who gathered recollections among the Comanche, that the chief killed at Mule Creek was not Peta Nocona but a man named No-Bah. Charlie Goodnight later wrote in a letter to historian J. Evetts Haley "He (Ross) did kill a chief whose name was No-Bah, but Nocona died a long time afterwards while hunting plums on the Canadian."


Now enters into the controversy Mrs. Zoe A. Tilghman, widow of renowned Oklahoma lawman William 'Uncle Billy' Tilghman. In a novel entitled QUANAH, EAGLE OF THE COMANCHES, in which Quanah is the central character, Mrs. Tilghman identifies the man killed by Ross as a Mexican slave, a servant of Nadua's. Jack Jackson, in his graphic novel COMANCHE MOON, accepted this version, as did Lucia St. Clair Robson in her award-winning novel RIDE THE WIND. Many 'revisionist historians' accept this identification in spite of the fact that Mrs. Tilghman's book is a novel, not a biography, and she cites no source for this identification.