Parker County in North Central Texas is named for her Uncle Isaac. Yet had it not been for her son, Comanche warrior Quanah Parker, Cynthia Ann Parker’s name might have been lost to history, along with countless other victims of brutality on the Western frontier.

When Quanah Parker appeared as part of the posse in the 1908 silent short The Bank Robbery, it was a pivotal moment for the fledgling movie industry and the beginning of America’s love affair with the bygone Western frontier. In his recently released book “The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend,” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Frankel connects the saga of Quanah Parker with the making one of Hollywood’s most iconic movies.

Directed by John Ford, starring John Wayne, and released by Warner Bros. in 1956, The Searchers was based on Alan LeMay’s novel of the same title, inspired by the story of Quanah Parker’s mother, Cynthia Ann.

In 1836, nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker and four family members were abducted during a Comanche raid on their isolated pioneer stockade, in the newly created Republic of Texas. Five others, including Cynthia Ann’s father, uncle and grandfather were savagely killed and dismembered. Twenty-four years later, having assimilated Comanche culture and mothered three children by tribal chief Peta Nocona. Cynthia Ann was discovered by Texas Rangers, following the Battle of Pease River, and released to her uncle, Isaac Parker.

Terrified by her white “captors,” Cynthia Ann more than once attempted escape with her infant daughter Prairie Flower, before resigning herself to her fate. Despite well-meaning efforts by a succession of Parker family members who took her in, Cynthia Ann pined for her Indian family until her death in 1871.

“She was virtually a prisoner among her own loving kindred, but they did not realize it until it was too late,” said Isaac Parker.

The transition to the white man’s world was much easier for Cynthia Ann’s son, who had evaded capture until 1875. Practical, as well as savvy, Quanah Parker helped enforce reservation laws and negotiate peace with the few remaining renegade bands that remained on the High Plains. He also made friends and eventually became business partners with influential ranchers such as S.B. “Burk” Burnett, E.C. Sugg, and Dan Waggoner, and even won over Theodore Roosevelt, who invited him to participate in his 1904 inaugural parade.

Proud of his white blood, Quanah Parker tracked down his mother’s unmarked grave in 1910 and had her reburied near his home in Comanche County, Okla. According to his son-in-law, Aubrey Birdsong, at the reburial, Quanah Parker said, “I love my mother. I like white folks….When people die today, tomorrow, ten years, I want them be ready like my mother. Then we all lie together again.”

Quanah Parker died in February 1911 and was buried next to the grave of his mother and Prairie Flower. The funeral was attended by 1,200 people, evenly divided between Indians and whites. His headstone bears the inscription: “Resting Here Until Day Breaks and Shadows Fall and Darkness Disappears Is Quanah Parker Last Chief of the Comanches.”

Ben Emison

Horseman, auctioneer, bloodstock agent, sales producer, all of those titles fit Ben Emison,a prominent figure in the world of Western performance horses for the past 50 years.

This week, Emison, a founder and co-owner with Milt Bradford of premier performance horse sales company Western Bloodstock, took on a new title as co-author of The Search for Hannah Lea, a crime thriller published by CreateSpace and available through amazon.com.

“I’ve always been somewhat of a dreamer,” said Emison, who fleshed out the bones of what would become The Search for Hannah Lea twenty-five years ago. “I had a vivid imagination, but not really the time to do anything with it. When I got involved with training and showing and then Western Bloodstock, I laid everything else aside.”

In 2006, Emison, who lives in Weatherford, Tex., attended his 50th high school reunion in Caraway, Ark., a small farming community in northeastern Arkansas, and reconnected with schoolmate Jerry Branscum. “We discovered that he was interested in writing, too,” said Emison. “So later he came to visit us in Texas and we began to go through my dead book file.

“Everything I had written was in long-hand, in notebooks or legal pads, and after (Jerry) skimmed through (The Search for Hannah Lea), he asked if he could take it home and write with me, and I said, ‘Yes, of course.’”

Emison, who was raised on a farm and grew up “behind a team of mules,” dreamed, when he was in high school, of a career as a hands-on cowboy. Branscum, however, pursued a career in agri-business that eventually took him around the world.

“Jerry was always the whizz kid in school and this (book) would not have worked without his help,” said Emison. “I excelled in ag, and was intersted in history and geography, but I didn’t like English and they kicked me out of typing. I had the imagination, but not the education to do anything with it.”

Emison’s plot and and Branscum’s story line come together in a perfect pitch in The Search For Hannah Lea.

Recently I came across a few treasures at an antique mall – dated but timeless books about horses, including George Tyler’s guide to the economics of the Western horse business.

Making money with Western horses?

Sixteen-year-old George Tyler did in 1926, when he borrowed $35 to buy a green 3-year-old gelding. Tyler put “a little handle” on the horse and sold it a few months later for $100.

“That is when I learned the most important thing about making money with horses,” noted Tyler of that early experience. “Get a horse well-broke, get him looking good and somebody will want to buy him from you.”

One horse led to another for the Gainesville, Texas cowboy and by the time he wrote “Making Money with Western Horses,” in 1964 with journalist Bob Gray, he was an acknowledged expert on buying, selling, and showing Quarter Horses. “He was the smartest horseman I ever knew,” said Matlock Rose, the legendary cutting horse trainer and Tyler’s partner in the 1950′s.

Over the years, Tyler’s partners and clientele included King Ranch, Waggoner 3-D Ranch, Hank Wiescamp, Gordon B. Howell, Lester Goodson, Rex Cauble and B.F. Phillips, Jr. He also served as ring steward for the Fort Worth Livestock Show and Rodeo for 25 years, and at one time single-handedly judged the entire American Quarter Horse Congress in Columbus, Ohio.

George Tyler

Here are a few of Tyler’s words of wisdom from “Making Money with Western Horses“:

Everybody knows the price of an old $65 horse or mule, but nobody knows what a good horse or mule might bring.

Never look at the good things about a horse. They will take care of themselves. Look for the things you don’t like and weigh them in your mind. Once you own that horse, you have got to live with those bad points.

You will gain more, in prestige as well as dollars, from three outstanding horses than from 50 mediocre horses.

If you get the “big eye” on a horse, that is, if you start liking him too much, you are liable to have trouble making money from the animal.

I’ve never been to a sale in my life where there weren’t some bargains. If nobody else buys those bargains, I’m going to do it.

Tyler died in 1983 and was inducted into the AQHA Hall of Fame in 1998.

Mexican drug cartel, dismembered human bodies, millions laundered through a race horse operation. It sounds like the plot for one of James Lee Burke‘s “Hackberry Holland” novels.

Maybe fans will get lucky and Burke will write Hack into a similar plot. But luck ran out for Tremor Enterprises on Tuesday, June 12, when FBI raids shut down their Quarter Horse racing operation, including a stable at Ruidoso Downs in NM and Zule Farm in Lexington, Okla.

A powerful Mexican drug cartel known as Zetas, had been using Tremor to launder millions of dollars in drug money, and the Feds became suspicious when they learned Tremor had paid more than $1 million for two broodmares in a single day. While Zetas king pin Miguel Angel Trevino Morales lived on the run, and his henchmen dismembered victims and dumped their bodies along a busy Mexican highway (49 bodies last month alone), his brother and second-in-command, Jose Trevino, was rubbing shoulders with prominent horsemen at high-profile horse races and sales.

Details and back story on the raid and the Morales brothers and Zetas appeared in a front-page feature by Ginger Thompson in Tuesday’s New York Times.

For those who prefer cold reality filtered through fiction, I recommend James Lee Burke, a master of flawed characters and compelling plots, whose language draws the reader into the landscape, which in the case of the Holland novels is the Southwest.

“It’s like a picture postcard slashed with a bloody knife. It’s heart-breakingly gorgeous and sandpaper-harsh, both at the same time,” said one reviewer of Burke’s “Feast Day of Fools.”

“Holy shit does this novel crush into its pages a whole war chest of bloody drama and brutal questions about what it means to be an American and a Christian and a Christian American in the new century. . . . James Lee Burke—muscular and elegiac, brutal and compassionate—is a Stetson-wearing, spur-jangling giant among novelists,” said Benjamin Percy for Esquire.

Burke first found success with his character Dave Robicheaux, deputy sheriff of New Iberia, La., in a series that includes more than a dozen titles.

James Lee Burke with Love That Sante Fe and Missy's Playboy

His character Hackberry Holland is the middle-aged, widowed sheriff of a small Texas town near the Mexican border. Hack lives alone on a ranch, where he cares for two geldings, Missy’s Playboy and Love That Santa Fe (named for Burke’s own horses) to the point that he lines the sides of their water tank with wire mesh to assure that rats, if they fall in, will be able to climb out.

I can”t say enough good things about James Lee Burke based on his Hackberry Holland series, so I will stop here and provide links to: Feast Day of Fools, Rain Gods and Lay Down My Sword and Shield.

If you were headed West in the 1860s, you probably carried two bibles – one for spiritual guidance and the other one, “The Prairie Traveler” by Captain Randolph B. Marcy, for advice on all your other needs along the trail.

Published by the U.S. War Department in 1859, 16 years before the last free band of Native Americans surrendered, and billed as “The Best-Selling Handbook for American Pioneers,” Marcy’s manual covers everything from the topography of specific routes to how to supply a wagon; select a camp; track and pursue Indians; ford rivers; descend mountains; and all other vital information for such a journey.

Fascinating from an historical perspective, “The Prairie Traveler” is also packed with practical observations on the behavior of horses, mules, oxen, and wild animals.

“For prairie service,” Marcy notes, “horses which have been raised exclusively upon grass, and never been fed on grain, or ‘range horses,’ as they are called in the West, are decidedly the best, and will perform more hard labor than those that have been stabled and groomed.”

A footnote points out that a “recent” experiment at the veterinary school in Alfort (founded near Paris in 1766) discovered that horses actively exercised after being fed digested their feed within three hours, while digestion for stalled horses had “scarcely commenced” in three hours.

Mules, in Marcy’s opinion, were superior to oxen, where good grass was available, because they could travel faster on firm ground and better endure the heat of summer. For a journey of 1,500 miles or more, over rough or muddy ground, oxen were more practical and economical.

Foreshadowing inherent risks of the trail, Marcy also explained that oxen were less likely to be stampeded and driven off by Indians, and, if necessary, they could be used for beef.

On the other hand, mules were easily induced to follow a “bell mare,” and except if they got water in their ears, in which case they were “often drowned,” made excellent swimmers.

“Whenever a mule in the water drops his ears, it is a sure indication that he has water in them, and he should be taken out as soon as possible,” Marcy cautions.

Horses and mules, he also notes, make good sentinels in Indian territory, often alerting, with heads raised, the direction of approaching danger, long before a dog would notice.
When crossing Indian country, Marcy recommends being on the alert for tracks: “Mustangs….leave a trail which is sometimes difficult to distinguish from that made by a mounted party of Indians, but if a single pile of dung is found, this is a sure indication that a herd of mustangs has passed, as they always stop to relieve themselves, while a party of Indians would keep their horses in motion, and the (dung) would be scattered along the road.”

A chapter titled “The Buffalo” describes in detail two methods for hunting buffalo: running them on horseback, and stalking or still-hunting. Running them requires a fleet, fresh, and fearless mount.

“As a long buffalo chase is very severe labor upon a horse,” he points out, “I would recommend to all travelers, unless they have a good deal of surplus horse-flesh, never to expend it running buffalo.”

“The Prairie Traveler,” which includes maps of the principle routes between the Mississippi and Pacific, noting landmarks along each trail, and the availability of water, wood, and grass.

It also features a map of the Pikes Peak gold region (a major lure for travelers) and numerous illustrations, including those of saddles and tack; horse tracks; the proper technique for fording a river and swimming a horse; and ones simply titled “The Grizzly,” and “Keep Away!”

“The Prairie Traveler” is available as a free download for the Kindle e-reader on amazon.com, where the soft cover book is also available.

Elmer Kelton’s classic novel “The Time It Never Rained” called to me last weekend, as drought conditions here in Texas worsened under relentless triple-digit heat.

It had been 20 years since I last read the book, and this time, I was especially struck by its timeliness. Not only because of the drought – Kelton’s setting is Texas during the seven-year drought that began in 1950 – but because of some of the hard-wired principles and prejudices that we still struggle with six decades later.

No one understood the struggle better than Kelton, who, as the son of a ranch foreman, grew up on West Texas ranches in the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1950s, after graduating from the University of Texas and serving in the U.S. Army during WWII, he worked as a farm and ranch reporter for the San Angelo Standard Times.

“In a broad sense this book is dedicated to the old-time Western ranchman, whose lifestyle gave him an inkling of Heaven and more than his proper share of Hell,” wrote Kelton in his dedication for “The Time It Never Rained.”

On the far side of fifty, Charlie Flagg, the book’s crusty, old protagonist, struggles as much with changing lifestyles, as from the drought. When Big Emmett Rodale, the local banker, advises him to sell his cattle, Flagg stubbornly points out that “there has never been a day since I was good grown that I haven’t owned some cattle.”

But Rodale, also a long-time friend, reminds him, “Tradition, Charlie. Tradition’s fine as long as a man can afford it. You can’t.”

Earlier in the book, when the new county agent wondered if Flagg was “one of the rich ones,” Kelton’s omniscient narrator explained that…

In this part of the country it was often hard to tell the rich man from the poor one by looking at him. The rich man was likely to be wearing patched trousers and run-over boots as the most destitute Mexican cowboy in town. One could not afford to put up a front and the other did not have to.

Charlie Flagg is not, of course, “one of the rich ones.” He is one like Kelton’s own father, Buck, to whom the book is also dedicated. One, as the county supervisor points out to his boss, that has “gone out of style, but the world will be a poorer place when it loses the last of his kind.”

If like me you are fortunate enough to have known some old-timers like Charlie Flagg, you will love Elmer Kelton’s book. If you haven’t known any, there is no better book than ”The Time It Never Rained” to meet the genuine article.

Kelton, who won numerous prestigious awards for his fiction, was a master at depicting characters as unvarnished and prickly as the cedar fence posts and barbed wire that separated their pastures.

I also highly recommend two other Kelton books – “The Good Old Boys” and “The Day the Cowboys Quit.”

“The Good Old Boys” was also made into a terrific movie (1995) starring Sam Shepard, Tommy Lee Jones, Sissy Spacek, Frances McDormand, Wilford Brimley, Larry Mahan, and Matt Damon.

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