Doc, gonna nit-pick here....
Three quarters of those Comanches still living were ALREADY on reservations around 1870, when Quanah Parker was just hitting his stride on the National stage, by the time Quanah gave up there were really no alternatives.
What I find fascinationg is Isa-tai, the guy who conjured up the famous "bulletproof" medicine prior to Adobe Walls wherein Quanah's followers, under his personal planning and direction, were shot to pieces by some of the most skilled and best-armed riflemen on the planet.
Isa-tai didn't have the advantage of being half-White, ergo conjuring up a lot of White sponsors after the shooting times were passing into legend, but still we find the guy opposing Quanah in tribal elections: Radical fringe-group Shaman and Prophet to mainstream tribal politician.... aguing such things as grazing allotments. Now THAT sounds like a transformation.
I'm gonna digress a little and talk about the 'unprecedented' Comanche mobility in that the same Comanches could raid 400 miles one way and 400 miles in another.
One of the most persistent myths in our popular history is that we tend to immobilized our Indians, as if they were stuck to the parts of those maps where the tribal name is written in those posters.
100 years prior to all of this, the Iroquois in Upstate New York were conducting a decades-long war with the Cherokees.... in Georgia.... routinely making about a 2,000 mile round trip, on foot yet. Likewise the Mississagua from the North side of Lake Erie were complaining about the dastardly and cunning Chickasaw... from Mississippi.
In the F&I War, it was the grave misfortune of a few captured Colonials up on Lake Champlain in northern New York State to be butchered, cooked and eaten by backwoods hick (they were still using bows and arrows) Odawas (Ottowas)... from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Likewise one of the more fortunate White captives from Lake Champlain was hauled across Lakes Ontario and Erie and clear down the Ohio and across to Louisiana when his Shawnee (IIRC) captors went to visit their kin among the Choctaws. And this was all in the early 1760's.
The all-time champions here maybe being them four Nez Perce who in 1831 took it upon themselves to travel upstream along the flood of Whites (ergo downstream along the Yellowstone, Missouri and Mississippi) on what is portrayed as seeking Christian instruction but seems certainly to have been a fact-finding tour: 2,000 miles one way from Idaho clear down to Saint Louis (by which time they had presumably seen enough) and then back again.
So it ain't surprising that a mounted Comanche from present-day Amarillo might visit San Antonio, or even Houston. What IS surprising is that long-term misery among the highly mobile Comanches should have been so localized.
A full thirty-five years before the last holdouts among the remote High Plains Comanches would be facing their final cultural annihalation, Gwynne points out the episode of impoverished, starving Southern Comanches from North of San Antonio visiting Sam Houston in 1839.
Why on earth these miserable folk didn't merely ride West for a week and take up residence with the next bunch of Comanches is a mystery... unless the vaunted Comanche plains-wide solidarity across the Plains was a myth.
Indeed the "next bunch" of Comanches would be suffering from deprivation and constant White hostility in their own turn, while confined by the 1850's on Texas reservations, still a full twenty years before Mackenzie attacked Palo Duro Canyon.
The conclusion seems inescapable... those people must have run out of options, notwithstanding their still-free kin a few hundred miles West.
There musta been a lot going on here that we are only dimly aware of.
Birwatcher
