Things aren’t looking so good in the town named for Quanah Parker, the last of the Comanche chiefs.

Quanah, Texas
photographed 12.26.2014

PS – Quanah Parker’s life is very interesting; his mother was a white woman who’d been captured at age 9 and who lived for 24 years with the Comanche before she was recaptured by Americans soldiers. The book Empire of the Summer Moon tells the story.

And, my friend Andy Wilkinson writes of Cynthia Ann Parker, Quanah’s mother, in the song “White Women’s Clothes.”

White Women’s Clothes
Andy Wilkinson: Charlie Goodnight (1994)

In the moon you call December
On the river you call the Pease
It was cold and I remember
We had just packed up to leave
When a mounted line of soldiers
A sparkle in the sun
Rode down upon our warriors
And shot them one by one

And the ponies of our women
They were loaded down and slow
With our lodge poles and equipment
And the meat of our buffalo
So the cowards of your cavalry,
When all the fight was o’er,
Killed the women and their babies
‘Cept for me and Prairie Flower

The white man’s liberation
Took me from my home
For the prison of his houses
And his white women’s clothes

You could see my hair was flaxen
You could see my eyes were blue
See my skin was white and ashen
Or you would have shot me too
But you could not see the baby that I cradled in my robes
Small red skinned Comanche
The color of my soul

The white man’s liberation
Took me from my home
For the prison of his houses
And his white women’s clothes

Dressed up for your amusement
In your used and second hands
You parade me through your settlements
And you call me Cynthia Anne
In these walls I’m suffocating
Where the wind never blows
While my heart is strangulating
In these white women’s clothes

The white man’s liberation
Took me from my home
For the prison of his houses
And his white women’s clothes

The white man’s liberation
Took me from my home
Took me from my home
Took me from my home
Took me from my home
Took me from my home
Took me from my home