Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (9 page)

She was a slave and was treated like one. Her job was to tend the horses at night and to “dress” buffalo skins by day, with a quota that she had to fill every full moon. This process involved painstakingly scraping all the flesh off the skin with a sharp bone. Lime was then applied to absorb grease, then the brains of the buffalo were rubbed all over it until it became soft.
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To make the quota and avoid a beating she often took her buffalo skins with her while she tended the horses. She had been given to an old man, and thus had
become the servant of his wife and daughter, both of whom mistreated her.

Rachel’s kidnapping may seem the somewhat random product of a random raid on a Texas settlement. There were, in fact, important reasons for what had happened to her, all related to the highly specialized buffalo economy of the plains. Hides and robes had always been useful trading items. (Comanche trade rested on horses, hides, and captives.) The hides were rising in value, so much so that, while an individual Comanche might eat only six buffalo per year, he would now kill an average of forty-four per year, and the number grew every year. The women, of course, did all the value-added work: preparing the hides and decorating the robes. The men of the plains soon realized that the more wives they had, the greater their production of hides would be, thus the more manufactured goods they could trade for.
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This simple commercial fact had two important effects: first, an increase in polygamy among Indian men; and second, a desire to seize and hold more women captives. These changes were perhaps more instinctive than deliberate among the Comanches. But it meant that Rachel’s days would always be long and hard, and that she would always have to meet her quotas.

She was also, unfortunately, pregnant. She had been four months pregnant at the time of the Parker raid, and had borne all of this misery in advancing stages of pregnancy. In October 1836 she gave birth to her second son. She knew immediately that the child was in danger. She spoke the Comanche language well enough to, as she put it, “expostulate with my mistress to advise me what to do to save my child.”
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To no avail. Her master thought the infant too much trouble, and feeding him meant that Rachel was not able to work full-time. One morning, when the baby was seven weeks old, half a dozen men came. While several of them held Rachel, one of them strangled the baby, then handed him to her. When he showed signs of life, they took him again, this time tying a rope around his neck and dragging him through prickly pear cactus, and eventually dragged him behind a horse around a hundred-yard circuit. “My little innocent one was not only dead, but literally torn to pieces,” wrote Rachel.
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The tribe moved on. In spite of what she had been through, Rachel somehow kept up her daily routines. She managed to note details of the flora, fauna, and geography that she saw. She wrote about prairie foxes, mirages of cool blue lakes that would appear magically in front of her, and shell fossils on the open plains. In what amounted to the first ethnography of the tribe, she noted details of Comanche society. The group moved every three or four days;
the men danced every night; some worshipped pet crows or deerskins; before going into battle the men would drink water every morning until they vomited; taboos included never allowing a human shadow to fall across cooking food. When she had free time, she climbed to the top of mountains and even explored a cave. With her new grasp of the language, she was able to eavesdrop on a large Indian powwow near the headwaters of the Arkansas River. Since women were not allowed in tribal councils, “I was several times repulsed with blows,” she wrote, “but I cheerfully submitted to abuse and persevered in listening to their proceedings.”
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She overheard a plan for a large-scale, multitribe invasion of Texas. After taking Texas, and driving out the inhabitants, they would attack Mexico. The attack was to come either in 1838 or 1839.

In spite of Rachel’s amazing resilience, she began to lose hope. She believed that her son, James, was probably dead, and that her husband, father, and mother had probably not survived the attack at Parker’s fort. She had almost no hope of escaping, or of ever changing her status in the tribe. Despondent, suicidal, but unable to kill herself, she decided to provoke her captors into doing the job for her. After being ordered by her captor’s daughter (“my young mistress”) to get a root-digging tool from the lodge, she refused. The young woman screamed at her, then ran at her. Rachel threw her onto the ground, held her down “fighting and screaming,” and began beating her over the head with a buffalo bone, expecting “at every moment to feel a spear reach my heart from one of the Indians.”
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If they were going to kill her, she was determined at least to make a cripple of her captor. As this unfolded, she realized that a large crowd of Comanche men had gathered around them. They were all yelling, but no one touched her. She won the fight. “I had her past hurting me and indeed nearly past breathing, when she cried out for mercy,” wrote Rachel. She let go of her adversary, who was bleeding freely, then picked her up, carried her back to the camp and washed her face. For the first time, the woman seemed friendly.

Not so her adoptive mother, who told Rachel she intended to burn her to death. (She had burned Rachel before with fire and hot embers.) Now Rachel and the old woman fought, in and around the roaring fire. Both were badly burned; Rachel knocked the woman into the fire twice and held her there. During the fight they broke through one side of the tipi. Again, a crowd of men assembled to watch them. Again, no one intervened. Again, Rachel won. The following morning twelve chiefs assembled at the “council house” to hear the case. All three women testified. The verdict: Rachel was sentenced
to replace the lodge pole she had broken. She agreed, provided that the young woman helped her. After that, Rachel says, “all was peace again.”

It is impossible to read Rachel Plummer’s memoir without making moral judgments about the Comanches. The torture-killing of a defenseless seven-week-old infant, by committee decision no less, is an act of almost demonic immorality by any modern standard. The systematic gang rape of women captives seems to border on criminal perversion, if not some very advanced form of evil. The vast majority of Anglo-European settlers in the American West would have agreed with those assessments. To them, Comanches were thugs and killers, devoid of ordinary decency, sympathy, or mercy. Not only did they inflict horrific suffering, but from all evidence
they enjoyed it.
This was perhaps the worst part, and certainly the most frightening part. Making people scream in pain was interesting and rewarding for them, just as it is interesting and rewarding for young boys in modern-day America to torture frogs or pull the legs off grasshoppers. Boys presumably grow out of that; for Indians, it was an important part of their adult culture and one they accepted without challenge.

A story from the early 1870s illustrates the larger point. According to the account of a former child captive named Herman Lehmann, who later became a full-fledged warrior, a group of Comanches had attacked some Tonkawa Indians, in their camp. They had killed some of them and run off the rest. In the abandoned camp, they found some meat roasting in the fire. It turned out to be the leg of a Comanche. The Tonkawas, known for their cannibalism, had been preparing a feast. This sent the Comanches into a fury of vengeance, and they pursued the Tonkawas. A fierce battle followed, in which eight Comanches were killed and forty were wounded. Still, they were victorious, and now, in the battle’s aftermath, they turned to deal with the enemy’s wounded and dying. “A great many were gasping for water,” wrote Lehmann, who was there,

but we heeded not their pleadings. We scalped them, amputated their arms, cut off their legs, cut out their tongues, and threw their mangled bodies and limbs upon their own campfire, put on more brushwood and piled the living, dying and dead Tonkaways on the fire. Some of them were able to flinch and work as worms, and some were able to speak and plead for mercy. We piled them up, put on more wood, and danced around in great glee as we saw the grease and blood run from their bodies, and were delighted to see them swell up and hear the hide pop as it would burst in the fire.
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This sort of cruelty is a problem in any narrative about American Indians, because Americans like to think of their native aboriginals as in some ways heroic or noble. Indians were, in fact, heroic and noble in many ways, especially in defense of their families. Yet in the moral universe of the West—in spite of our own rich tradition of torture, which includes officially sanctioned torments in Counter-Reformation Europe and sovereign regimes such as that of Peter the Great in Russia—a person who tortures or rapes another person or who steals another person’s child and then sells him cannot possibly be seen that way. Crazy Horse was undoubtedly heroic in battle and remarkably charitable in life. But as an Oglala Sioux he was also a raider, and raiding meant certain very specific things, including the abuse of captives. His great popularity—a giant stone image of him is being carved from a mountain in South Dakota—may have a great deal to do with the fact that very little is known about his early life.
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He is free to be the hero we want him to be.

Thus some chroniclers ignore the brutal side of Indian life altogether; others, particularly historians who suggest that before white men arrived Indian-to-Indian warfare was a relatively bloodless affair involving a minimum of bloodshed, deny it altogether.
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But certain facts are inescapable: American Indians were warlike by nature, and they were warlike for centuries before Columbus stumbled upon them. They fought over hunting grounds, to be sure, but they also made a good deal of brutal and bloody war that was completely unnecessary. The Comanches’ relentless and never-ending pursuit of the hapless Tonkawas was a good example of this, as was their harassment of Apaches long after they had been driven from the buffalo grounds.

Such behavior was common to all Indians in the Americas. The more civilized agrarian tribes of the east, in fact, were far more adept at devising lengthy and agonizing tortures than the Comanches or other plains tribes.
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The difference lay in the Plains Indians’ treatment of female captives and victims. Rape or abuse, including maiming, of females had existed when eastern tribes had sold captives as slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But that practice had been long ago abandoned. Some tribes, including the giant Iroquois federation, had never treated women captives that way.
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Women could be killed, and scalped. But not gang-raped. What happened to the Parker captives could only have happened west of the Mississippi. If the Comanches were better known for cruelty and violence, that
was because, as one of history’s great warring peoples, they were in a position to inflict far more pain than they ever received.

Most important, the Indians themselves saw absolutely nothing wrong with these acts. For westering settlers, the great majority of whom believed in the idea of absolute good and evil, and thus of universal standards of moral behavior, this was nearly impossible to understand. Part of it had to do with the Comanches’ theory of the nature of the universe, which was vastly different from that of the civilized West. Comanches had no dominant, unified religion, or anything like a single God. Though in interviews after their defeat they often seemed to go along with the idea of a “Great Spirit,” Comanche ethnographers Ernest Wallace and E. Adamson Hoebel were extremely skeptical of any creation myths that involved a single spirit or an “evil one.”
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“We never gave much consideration to creation,” said an old Comanche named Post Oak Jim in an interview in the 1930s. “We just knew we were here. Our thoughts were mostly directed toward understanding the spirits.”
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The Comanches lived in a world alive with magic and taboo; spirits lived everywhere, in rocks, trees, and in animals. The main idea of their religion was to find a way to harness the powers of these spirits. Such powers thus became “puha,” or “medicine.” There was no dogma, no priestly class to impose systematic religion, no tendency to view the world as anything but a set of isolated episodes, with no deeper meaning. There were behavioral codes, to be sure—a man could not steal another man’s wife without paying penalties, for example. But there was no ultimate good and evil: just actions and consequences; injuries and damages due.

Enemies, meanwhile, were enemies, and the rules for dealing with them had come down through a thousand years. A Comanche brave who captured a live Ute would torture him to death without question. It was what everyone had always done, what the Sioux did to the Assiniboine, what the Crow did to the Blackfeet. A Comanche captured by a Ute would expect to receive exactly the same treatment (thus making him weirdly consistent with the idea of the Golden Rule), which was why Indians always fought to their last breath on battlefields, to the astonishment of Europeans and Americans. There were no exceptions. Of course, the same Indians also believed, quite as deeply, in blood vengeance. The life of the warrior tortured to death would be paid for with another torture-killing if possible, preferably even more hideous than the first. This, too, was seen as fair play by all Indians in the Americas.

What explains such a radical difference in the moral systems of the
Comanches and the whites they confronted? Part of it has to do with the relative progress of civilizations in the Americas compared to the rest of
the world. The discovery of agriculture, which took place in Asia and the Middle East, roughly simultaneously, around 6,500 BC, allowed the transition from nomadic, hunter-gatherer societies to the higher civilizations that followed. But in the Americas, farming was not discovered until 2,500 BC, fully four thousand years later and well after advanced cultures had already sprung up in Egypt and Mesopotamia. This was an enormous gap. Once the Indians figured out how to plant seeds and cultivate crops, civilizations in North and South America progressed at roughly the same pace as they had in the Old World. Cities were built. Highly organized social structures evolved. Pyramids were designed. Empires were assembled, of which the Aztecs and Incas were the last. (As in the Old World, nomadism and hunter-gatherer cultures persisted alongside the higher civilizations.) But the Americas, isolated and in any case without the benefit of the horse or the ox, could never close the time gap. They were three to four millennia behind the Europeans and Asians, and the arrival of Columbus in 1492 guaranteed that they would never catch up. The nonagrarian Plains Indians, of course, were even further behind.