Parker and I followed the cattle trails near the creek and river. We stopped only once, when we flushed about twenty wild turkeys from the brush. As we walked on, Parker shared the version of the “battle” he’d been taught by the Comanche.
“Pease River was a Ranger-led massacre,” Parker told me. His great-great-grandfather Peta Nocona, he said, was nowhere near the action. “At the time, Nocona was with his teenage sons Quanah and Pecos and other warriors.” Nocona died several years later near the Antelope Hills in Oklahoma, Parker said. “He died of an infection.”
Parker, a Vietnam War vet, is also director of the Quanah Parker Society, headquartered in the nearby Hardeman County town of Quanah, named after his great-grandfather. His version of events definitively contradicts Ross’s story and accounts in history books. (The same account Ross provided DeShields also appears in John Wesley Wilbarger’s