Finding Direction: The Wind Vane Chronicles

(On the tombstone of Chief Quanah Parker, Ft. Sill, Oklahoma.) 

Today I tell a poignant, but ultimately uplifting story from American history and tie it to my own.  More specifically about Texas and Oklahoma history and Chief Quanah Parker, to whom I may even be kin.

 I wrote a few weeks ago about death and eulogies and epitaphs that I called "Journey to a Far Shore."  Remember?  In that post (in which I said I was not trying to be morbid and I wasn’t, nor am I today), I compared death to sailing off into the sunset toward a lighthouse across the short way whose beacon guides us home. I talked about all of the loving voices from our family and friends calling out to us in the growing darkness across the water also helping to guide us home.

Today I talk about some interesting lives, then death as resting quietly for a bit while waiting for morning. 

As fate would have it and as life unfolds ever surprisingly, both good and bad, it wasn’t but a few days after I wrote that other post that when I went into the hospital in Durango, Colorado with multiple immediate life threatening problems beginning with acute kidney failure and I thought about what I had written.

But something seemed lacking. 

I’ve also mentioned over the past three or four months that Tom and I recently made wills, signed health care directives and powers of attorney and talked with each of our children at length about life, death, values and beliefs.  We talked about worldy possesions and eternal destinies.  We talked about plans to have a headstone carved now to put on our graves for the time when we shall lie next to Tom’s dad in the Old Biloxi cemetery under the majestic live oaks.

Something still seemed lacking.

Then providence intervened, as it so often does, and I discovered the missing pieces.  They are some of the words above that Tom and I want engraved on our headstone and it’s an interesting story about how we found them and why we want to use them.

We were on our "Route 66" road trip coming home across the panhandle of Texas when we saw a most unusual rest area on I-40 east of Amarillo.  It was on the other side of the interstate for people headed the other way, but we were so intrigued we drove to the next exit and turned around to come back to it.

It was a huge manmade hill built in the middle of the flat prairie.  Its center was cut through front to back and composed of high glass walls with a ceiling soaring above.  Outside rose a giganitic wind turbine while inside an old windmill spun slowly under the power of an electric motor.  

Numerous displays told the story of the "old west" beginning with the Spanish conquistedors who came up through what is now Texas looking for gold in the early 1500s.  When they got there they found no gold, but countless clans of native American pueblo dwellers and other clans of nomads roaming the vast prairies hunting buffalo for sustenance.  

One such group was composed of many smaller clans, all tribes of the Comanches.  They lived and roamed across northern Texas and Oklahoma.

They were warrior tribes in many ways, but mostly after being hunted down and killed by the white man who later came to take over their lands.  In truth, they were a peace loving at heart and had great families.

In 1836 a young white girl of about 9 who lived in West Texas, Cynthia Ann Parker, was captured along with two other children by a Comanche raiding party.  She became part of the Comanche culture, part of a loving family, forgot the English language and never was fully integrated into the white world again.

Her story is a sad one.  She died heartbroken at 43 after being forcefully taken back to her white family 25 years after her capture.  She’d just  learned of the death of three of her children by her Comanche husband  from influenza.  She’d cut her hair short – the Comanche way of showing grief – and mourned.  There is a last picture of her, thus, with her baby daughter, Prairie Flower, at her breast.

But her life was also filled with goodness.  The blue eyed girl had married a Comanche chief, Peta Nocona and had children that lived, the oldest being Quanah Parker, who became the last great chief of all the Comanche tribes, beginning with his own, the Quahadi tribe.  He never lost a battle against the white man and later worked with them, even journeying to Washington, D. C. to bring about peace between his people and theirs. 

Quanah Parker (check out each link to different photos and interesting facts about Quanah) provided forceful leaderhip and supported education, ranching and farming as a new way of life for the Comanches.  In 1905, Parker even rode next to Geronimo in Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade.  He could not read, but spoke three languages, English, Spanish and Indian, and moved with ease between his mother’s and his father’s peoples. 

He educated his children among the white man so that they would be prepaerd in the early 20th century for their lives to come lived nearly exclusivly among white men.

Quanah Parker died on February 21, 1911 at  age 63 when his great heart gave out and was interred next to his mother’s grave, which he had just recently moved from Texas to Oklahoma to be near him and the people who had become hers and who she loved.  Their graves had to be moved a couple of times later, but with honor and are now at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

According to the rest area display near Amarillo, Quanah Parker’s grave reads:  "Resting here until day breaks and shadows fall and darkness disappears is Quanah Parker, the last chief of the Comanches."  I loved that and copied it down on a post a note that I have here on my big wooden desk.

You see, my own heritiage and ancestry includes my great-grandmother on my dad’s side who was native American from either Texas or Oklahoma, I’m not sure which, or maybe even Georgia.  My  great-grandmother on my mother’s side (see this post) taught school in the late 1800s in Oklahoma Indian territory before it became our 46th state in 1907.  Tom is part Cherokee, as well, some of whom were in Mississippi, and his heritage shows.  While I tan easily, even when I’m at my darkest, I’m lighter than Tom whose skin quickly turns Indian dark brown.

So we wish to have the words of the great chief Quanah Parker on our tombstone as well.  I now think of them every night when I go to sleep along with "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray Thee Lord my soul to keep.  If I should die before I wake, I pray Thee Lord my soul to take.  If I should live for other days, I pray Thee Lord to guide my ways."  They comfort me with thoughts of momentary peaceful rest until the dawn of an eternal sunrise and the brightest of all tomorrows.

"Resting here until day breaks and shadows fall and darkness disappers . . ."

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