Quanah Parker and his Quahada Comanches came in to the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache reservation in southwestern Oklahoma in 1875, after the Red River War. Most Numunuu found reservation life hard or impossible. Quanah adapted so readily that federal agents named him chief of the Comanche bands, a post with no precedent in Comanche tradition, and the tribe went along. The Texas grass is the best way into what he did with it.
Grass at six and a half cents
From the 1880s Texas cattlemen leased reservation grass, among them W. T. Waggoner, Burk Burnett, C. T. Herring and E. C. Sugg. Quanah supported the leases and defended them by pointing out that white ranchers' herds were already on Comanche pasture, with or without legal sanction. Named lessees, he hoped, would help keep out everyone else. With his help Burnett leased 300,000 acres at 6.5 cents an acre and ran 10,000 cattle there until 1902. Daniel Waggoner died that year holding leases on more than 100,000 acres in Indian Territory. Many tribal members opposed leasing at first, until the shared income won them over, and some band chiefs accused Quanah of working for the ranchers. In December 1885 he went to Fort Worth to buy wire and fencing for the tribe's pastures and to talk about overdue rent.
The Star House and the town
Gifts from Texas cattlemen helped build the Star House, a frame home with a picket fence, put up about 1890. Estimates of its rooms run from twelve to twenty-two, and the stars on its roof have more than one explanation. Quanah also held about $40,000 in stock in the Quanah, Acme and Pacific Railway. The town of Quanah, surveyed by the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway in 1884, carries his name, and he visited often. In 1905 he was in President Theodore Roosevelt's wolf-hunt party in the Big Pasture.
The Jerome Agreement and the lottery
In 1892 the Jerome Commission offered $2 million for about 2.5 million acres of surplus land and 160 acres for every Indian. Quanah and other Comanche leaders signed on October 6. Kiowa leaders petitioned that the interpreter had defrauded them. Accounts of Quanah's part differ. One has him making repeated trips to Washington against the plan, then taking the best terms he could in 1900. Agent James Randlett wrote that nearly every signer acted under "forced conviction," and that grass payments from the 1886 leases far exceeded the 5 percent interest on the $2 million. The Senate ratified the agreement on June 6, 1900, and the Supreme Court upheld Congress in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock in 1903.
More than 165,000 people registered for thirteen thousand homesteads in the lottery of July 1901, and the opening came on August 6. About 480,000 acres, the Big Pasture, stayed in common and was leased to Texas ranchers until 1906. Burnett, told after 1898 to surrender his lease, bought 107,520 acres in Carson County to offset the loss. Quanah kept ranching until he died in 1911. He lies beside his mother, Naduah, at Fort Sill.
The Quanah, Acme and Pacific Depot Museum in the town of Quanah is the place to start, and the 6666 Supply House in Guthrie carries Burnett's lease into the ranch's story.