Historian S. C. Gwynne on the Doubtful Future of Quanah Parker’s Home

How long did it take you to research this? You know, I did this partly while I was at a day gig, so I'm not really sure, probably three or four years, something like that. There isn't as much as you would think, because, and the reason is, I mean, there's a fair amount and it's all in Texas, which is good, but there is one curious thing about writing about Native Americans is that they don't, they didn't write anything down. So if you're writing about, say, Winston Churchill, I mean, you can track him from like his bath in the morning to his seventh note to Asquith, to Asquith, to his notes to his wife, to all of his proceedings in Parliament, and everything he ever did, it's like moment by moment, you take someone like Quana out on the plains and you've got pretty much nothing. And so what you have, what you do have are, you know, flashes that are seen by, say, the Spanish originally, or the French, or Mexicans, or Texans and Americans as they come through, you're seeing them in flashes as they're presented to you, because there are no parish records, there's no legal records, there's no interviews, there's no things like that. That's so stunning. Yeah. It's so stunning, but that's one of the weirdest things about where they are today in 2019, this idea that they don't have really a reservation or specific giant chunk of land that's theirs that they can sort of preserve at least some of this history. Yeah, no, it was a peculiarity of Oklahoma that it went that way, because there are other states, as we talked about earlier, who do have large reservations to this day. Yeah, so if you're writing about them, when you get to sort of the post-reservation period, so let's say into the 1880s, 1890s, the world does change in terms of, you know, things are being written down. You know, Quana becomes a big part of his society. He's setting up cattle leasing deals, he's founding a school board. I mean, he does all these things that, you know, that you wouldn't necessarily think a glorious chief of the command chiefs would do, but he does those things. And those are very trackable. I mean, you know exactly what he's doing, and you can research them in conventional ways. I was fascinated by the peyote rituals too. Now, was that a natural, normal part of Comanche life, or is this something that he adopted from other tribes? He adapted it from something that had gone on the border, on the Mexican border, but he became the founder of the Native American church, which had a peyote ritual in which he and it became famous for. And so there was this great, a place I would really like to go back to in American history would be to Quana's house. Quana got his cattlemen buddies to build him. First of all, he wanted the US government to build him a house, because Quana was a hustler, and he said, could I please have a house? And he said, you can't have a house. So he went to his cattlemen buddies, and they built him this magnificent house, it was like 4,500 square feet, double porch with these giant white stars in the roof. It became known as... Is that his house right there? That star house, it's fallen down, but now, but yes, in its heyday, it looked really... So that still exists to this day? It does, and it's about to fall down, and they've... Who owns it? Well, this guy who lives in cash or lawton, Oklahoma, and who doesn't... Who has been unwilling to accept help or money from everybody from the Comanche Nation to... That's it right there. It always had the stars on the roof right there? Yeah, it did, because he saw that US generals had these stars in their colors, and he wanted more than they had. And but that still sits there in cash Oklahoma. Yeah. Now, I've been in it, but it's gotten so beat up now that they don't let you go in it anymore, but it sits there. So that we have... So as long as we have that there, in 1895, if you went there in the... They say early 1890s, it would have been one of the most amazing scenes. We had people like Geronimo coming to dinner, Roosevelt came to dinner, Nelson Miles, the great general came to dinner. He had a... I think it was a Swiss-Mexican cook. He had six wives. He had 19... 21 children, 19 who grew to adulthood. The house is full of kids. It would have been surrounded by lodges. The reason it would have been that is because people, his own tribe had come in for help, money or pay for a funeral or going back to the peyote ritual, which is a healing ritual. And so you would have seen one of the great scenes in the American West. When he died in 1911, people found out that he had given most of his money away. To all these people who had come in asking for his help, he had in fact helped them and given most of his cattle ranching money away that he had made. Now this house is owned by one individual? Yes. But it's a historical landmark and no one's preserving it. They're not doing anything to... I don't know all the details of it, but it's owned by Wayne Gibson and his sister, as far as I know still. They've owned it for a while. They don't want any help. It was that house was put into an amusement park years ago to preserve it that was owned by Wayne's uncle, as far as I know. So it was taken apart? It was... Was it taken apart? I don't know. They did move it though. They moved it. So this is not the original location where it's at right now? No, the original location was out on what turned out to be later to be a Fort Sill Gunnery artillery range. And so they moved it. And so Kwan is a daughter, I guess it was, moved it down into cash. And then it was moved one more time into this amusement park, literally. When I went into this amusement park, it was like something out of a, I don't know, a Spielberg movie. I mean, you go... I was told the house was back there and I couldn't really believe it. But so we go in and you're going by these defunct old roller coasters that are all overgrown with vines like Sleeping Beauty's castle, you know, and there's cows everywhere and rides and carousels all overgrown. And then you go through a series of houses that were also moved there, like Frank James's house or something, and keep going, keep going in the back. There that thing was. The house was sitting there. Wow. Now, it is his. He owns it. He's been approached, as I said, by all sorts of different people, consortiums of people with money who want to buy it or just save it, you know, from literally the Comanche nation I know has wanted to and Texas Tech has and some Dallas people and any number of people. And so to my knowledge, thus far, he refuses to sell or to take their help. Dang it. Was that him right there? I think that is. I think that's him. Wayne. Wayne Gibson, yeah. Yeah, that's him. He's a perfectly nice guy. He feels the house is very special in his family and it is indeed very special. But he won't. The last tour I got with him, as you're going up the main stairwell, there was a four foot by six inch hole in the main, in the roof above the main stairwell. I mean, you can't really have a four foot by six inch hole. No. Yeah, there it is. And the rain would just come through. But so. What can you do to preserve a house like this while still leaving it the way it is? So it's, you know what I'm saying? Like you would have to replace the wood. Now if you replace the wood, is it still the same house? Like there's arguments about boats. They've found some ancient boats and they've done some rebuilding of these boats. Now all of a sudden you're looking at new wood and the shape of this old boat. Like what is it now? Is it? What is it? Yeah. So I tell you, the first time I walked in there, which was 15 years ago, you wouldn't have needed to do that much work to it. 15 years ago. Yeah, you would not have needed to. You would have needed some bolstering for sure and the foundation would have needed some work, but it has gone way downhill because nothing's been done to it. So now I don't know. But when I walked in there, you really could have a good carpenter and, you know, carpenter team and a month, you could have shored that thing out. Jesus Christ. Yeah. That's so sad. Yeah, and I don't know how much of it. I mean, a lot of it was the problem was with all those holes in it, stuff had started to rot and rot is different than, you know. And then you would have to actually really replace that wood. So at the end of the day, it was going to be a certain percentage of it was going to be new, but at least you could sort of get a semblance of what it was and do your best to sort of. You had like a real good architect on hand and a real good engineer and someone from some sort of historical society where they could look at it and say, okay, this is, we want to maintain as much of this old stuff as possible while making sure this thing can last for more people to see it. I think they could still do that, but I'm no expert, but there's plenty of it that you can save. And there's things like, you know, there's that famous, it's in my book, it's a picture of the table, Quanah's table there. And you've got the tin ceiling that's still there and the floorboards are still there. And those are all the same, you know, the same stuff. So I don't know, I'm no expert on it, but until the owner, because it's his, until the owner decides to do something to it. Come on, bro. What's his name? I think it's Wayne Gibson. Wayne. Gibson. Come on, Wayne. It's ridiculous. He's a lovely guy. I'm sure he's a lovely guy. He just doesn't want to do that. You know, he's a lovely guy. He's a lovely guy. He's a lovely guy. He's a lovely guy. He's a lovely guy. He's a lovely guy. He's a lovely guy. He's a lovely guy. He's a lovely guy. He's a lovely guy. He's a lovely guy. He's a lovely guy. He's a lovely guy. He's a lovely guy. He's a lovely guy. He's a lovely guy. He's a lovely guy. He's a lovely guy. He's a lovely guy. He's a lovely guy. He's a lovely guy. He's a lovely guy. He's a lovely guy. He's a lovely guy. He's a lovely guy. He's a lovely guy. He's a lovely guy.