“He spoke to Jesus Christ?”

This is Quanah Parker, war leader of the Kwahadi (“Antelope”) band of the Comanches.  He was the son of a Comanche chief and a kidnapped white woman, Cynthia Ann Parker.  Ironically, his name translates to English as “smell” or “odor.” He clashed with the American military in the Midwest in the 1870s and eventually surrendered and was consigned to the Indian reservation at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He was so charismatic the federal government made him the principal chief of the Comanche Nation.  He learned the ‘white ways’ well enough to become quite wealthy as a rancher. While he encouraged Comanches to become Christians, he started the Native American Church which advocated the use of peyote. Regarding the religious importance of peyote, he was widely quoted as stating: “The White Man goes into his church house and talks about Jesus, but the Indian goes into his tipi and talks to Jesus.”  He had as many as eight wives, two of them in this photograph.  When he was told he should only have one wife, he was supposed to have said, “Which one do you want me to have? You can tell the others they are no longer my wives.” He died in 1911.

www.authormasterminds.com/steve-levi.

Steve Levi is an Alaskan writer who specializes in the Alaska Gold Rush (nonfiction) and the ‘impossible crime,’ (fiction.)  An ‘impossible crime’ is one where the detective must figure out HOW the crime was committed before going after the perpetrators – like a Greyhound bus with bank robbers and hostages disappearing off the Golden Gate Bridge –THE MATTER OF THE VANISHING GREYHOUND. Steve’s books can be found at www.authormasterminds.com/steve-levi

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