Battle of Blanco Canyon: Quanah Parker's Midnight Raid

On the night of October ninth, eighteen seventy-one, a young Comanche war leader led a small raiding party into the cavalry camp of Colonel Ranald Mackenzie and drove off seventy horses and mules in the darkness. The leader's name was Quanah Parker, a young man, son of a Comanche chief and a captured white woman named Cynthia Ann Parker who had been taken from her Texas farm as a child and raised Comanche. Quanah had chosen his people.

Mackenzie had assembled eight companies of the Fourth United States Cavalry and ridden into Blanco Canyon that fall under orders from General William Tecumseh Sherman. The Kotsoteka and Quahadi bands of the Comanche had refused to come in to their reservation after the Warren Wagon Train Raid earlier that year, and the army intended to end the freedom of the Southern Plains Comanche by force. Mackenzie was one of the most capable officers on the frontier. Sherman trusted him.

The canyon was new territory for the army. Mackenzie's command was the first non-Comanche military force to enter Blanco Canyon since the Comanche had come to power on the Llano Estacado. They were moving through the enemy's home ground, and Quanah Parker knew every arroyo.

After the horse raid, the cavalry gave chase. A running engagement played out over two days across the caprock country before a blue norther rolled in on October twelfth , a blizzard of snow and sleet that halted the pursuit and allowed the Comanche to vanish into the canyon country. Mackenzie retreated, short of horses, short of supplies, certain he had failed. One soldier died in the fighting. Lieutenant Robert Goldthwaite Carter earned the Medal of Honor for his actions during the engagement.

Mackenzie came back three years later, in the Red River War of eighteen seventy-four. At Palo Duro Canyon he destroyed the Comanche horse herd and broke the will of the Quahadi band. Quanah Parker surrendered in eighteen seventy-five. The battle in Blanco Canyon was the opening round of the campaign that ended the Comanche era on the Southern Plains.