Quanah Parker (1845-23 February 1911) was a mixed-race Comanche war chief and Native American Church leader. Parker was the son of an Indian Comanche chief and Cynthia Ann Parker, an English-American woman, and he resisted the United States in the Red River War until he was forced to surrender in 1875 after being defeated at Adobe Walls in Texas.
Biography[]
Quanah Parker was born in 1845 in the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma, the son of Comanche chief Peta Nocona and Cynthia Ann Parker, a white woman who had been kidnapped by the tribe at the age of nine and assimilated into the Comanche. He became a war chief in the 1870s at the time of the hard war on the southern Great Plains (in Texas and Oklahoma) by the US Army against the Native Americans, and he repelled an attack on Adobe Walls by the US troops. However, the 28 September 1874 defeat at the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon forced Parker to surrender to the United States, and he moved to Cache, Oklahoma, where he became a leader of the Native American Church Christian movement. Parker led his people on the reservation until his death in 1911, having become a wealthy rancher during his time in the Indian Territory.