Bill Neeley

The half-breed warrior chief Quanah Parker raided and evaded white settlers across Comanchería from Oklahoma to Mexico for twenty years before bringing his people in to the reservation and transforming himself into a cattle baron whose influence preserved the peyote religion into the 20th c. The peyote bit is enough to secure Parker’s place in history, but Neeley relates a number of fascinating episodes based upon primary sources written by people who knew, fought and followed Parker until his death in 1911. One such episode recounts Parker’s reliance upon a certain medicine man who claimed to have formulated a special paint that made Indians impervious to bullets. The medicine man’s name, Esa-tai, translates to ‘Rear End of the Wolf’ in most sources, though Neeley discovers that some refer to him as Coyote Droppings (subsequent to a failed siege during the Battle of Adobe Walls).

The scope of The Last Comanche Chief is necessarily limited, though there are many good stories here, and Neeley writes well enough, but he falls back on simplistic journalistic summarization when he says that Quanah “passed within a single lifetime from a Stone Age warrior to a statesman in the age of Industrial Revolution.” A 19th c. Stone Age? It’s much more complex and interesting than that.… (meer)