On the second Saturday in September Texans celebrate “Quanah Parker Day,” featuring Quanah as the greatest Comanche Chief.
Last year in this column we noted that the Parkers of our original area established Fort Parker in Limestone County, where on May 19, 1836 a Comanche-led attack resulted in the kidnaping of nine year old Cynthia Anne Parker who, upon marriage to the Comanche Chief, Peta Nacona, became the mother of Quanah Parker.
We also noted that Jesse Grimes, first chief Justice of original Montgomery County, and his colleague, Andrew Montgomery, received official thanks for attending survivors in a book by one of the captives entitled The Rachel Plummer Narrative.
In this new edition we will focus on the link of the Quanah Parker story to that of the concept of US Westward Expansion called “Manifest Destiny.” Our story begins with notation that Quanah’s birth site, according to most sources, was in Texas in 1845. This date and site is linked to the community of Anderson, now in Grimes County, but once in the original Montgomery County.
It was in this community in 1845 that Kenneth Anderson, last vice president of the Texas Republic, found lodging and died on his route home from the state capital where he had just orchestrated Texas’s birth as a state. This death birthed the name of the community of Anderson while a national journalist named John O’Sullivan in 1845 coined the term “Manifest Destiny” in reference to Texas’s role in Westward Expansion.
While Quanah’s birthday in Texas in 1845 is thus significant in terms of Manifest Destiny, so is the history of his last days as a great leader of his people.
Those days are linked historically to the final “continentalization process” of the United States. It is generally contended that the connection of the Union and Continental Railroad lines in Utah on May 10th, 1869 marked the final coming together of the US as a continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. However, at that time, the Comanches were yet rulers of the great plains, leaving a power vacuum in the center of our country.
It was this vacuum which the final surrender of Quanah Parker closed. The event which set the scene for that grand event was the “Battle of Adobe Walls” in 1874 where the big guns of buffalo hunters decimated Quanah’s forces. Consequently, Quannah led his people peacefully into captivity at Fort Sill in 1875. This demise of Comanche dominance of the plains brought to fruition the final nationalization process initially set in motion with the joining of the railroads.
Parker’s surrender furthermore coincided with the then new Darwinian philosophy which, while replacing the original contextual precepts of Manifest Destiny, came to characterize US overseas imperialism; I address this historical process, from its beginning in the 1600s until the present, in my forthcoming latest book entitled “Rekindling Manifest Destiny: Revitalizing America.”
Robin Montgomery is a native of Montgomery County, a historian, author, retired professor and columnist for The Courier.
