Texas's Quanah Parker Trail

Discover the life of the legendary Comanche following the arrows in the Lone Star State.

- By Mike Cox

Quanah Parker, war chief of the last band of free-roaming Quahadi Comanches, faced the biggest battle of his life. But on this spring day in 1875 the fight would not be with the hated, blue-coated horse soldiers- it was with himself.

The son of Chief Peta Nocona and Cynthia Ann Parker, a white captive who adapted to Comanche ways only to be “rescued” by Texas Rangers in 1860 and forcibly returned to her birth family, Quanah had risen from young warrior to savvy war chief. He had been fighting for years to retain his people's way of life on the huge expanse known as the Llano Estacado or Staked Plains.

Only a year before, in the heart of Comancheria, commercial buffalo hunters had established a trading post called Adobe Walls in present-day Hutchinson County, Texas. Their primary food source was rapidly being decimated by the hide hunters, hundreds of Comanches, and Kiowas led by Quanah attacked the enclave in June 1874. The hunters-seasoned marksmen-held off the Indians even though the defenders stood badly outnumbered.

The Adobe Walls attack triggered the Red River War, the U.S. Army's 1874-75 campaign to force Quanah and his people to the Comanche-Kiowa reservation at Fort Sill in western Oklahoma. In a score of engagements or skirmishes, Quanah and his warriors fought hard, using well-honed guerrilla tactics to stave off a 3,000-man military force bent on their subjugation. But the Comanches, once considered all but invincible, were not going to prevail.