Of Comanches. Methodists and Strangite Mormons

Quanah Parker was an active polygamist. There is historical proof he had seven wives (pictured to the right with two of them) and, at least, twenty-five children but my mother's father and his brother claimed to be the twin sons of his 15th wife. But they also claim to be the younger brothers to White Parker whose mother was Mah-Cheeta-Wookey, Quanah's third wife. The second claim has more historical substantiation as Mah-Cheeta-Wookey died in 1902 and left the care of her remaining small children to her oldest son White and his wife Laura Clark who began as Methodist missionaries to the Comanche Nation in 1914.

Family legend attests that a Methodist preacher named Sanford Francis Yarberry and his wife Mary Ann (Lively), en route from Benton Country Arkansas to the Colorado territory in 1903, adopted two sons of Quanah and Mah-Cheeta-Wookey who had been left in the care of White and Laura. There is no record of the boy's Indian names but their adoptive names were Rodney Herbert, my maternal grandfather, and John Milton Yarberry, John being older than Rodney by two years.

As a sidenote, Sanford Yarberry was heading to Colorado looking for his uncle from whom no one in the family had heard since he had gone West two decades earlier. At that time they had no idea that Uncle Milt had been a rather notorious gunfighter in Southern Colorado and New Mexico and had been hired in 1880 as the first town marshal for Albuquerque. After shooting to death, an unarmed citizen, the city hanged old Milt on February 9, 1883.

My grandfather married three women, although he was not a polygamist. His first wife was Maude J. Dunn, his second, an Indian woman known only as Tillie and my grandmother, Leota Winona Park (Miller). With his first wife, he had one daughter, my Aunt Betsy. With his second there is no record of any children born and with my grandmother he inherited two step-daughters, my Aunts Eileen and Denny, then they had one daughter together, Roxana Lee, my mother. My grandmother and grandfather met when their two husbands decided to meet weekly to play cards with the wives. Apparently Maude fell in love with Mr. Park and Mrs. Park, Leota, fell in love with Rodney and both couples divorces and remarried each other. They continued playing cards together until my grandfather went on a drunk in 1949. My grandmother died in 1955, when I was four years old. The whole thing caused quite the little stink in Pueblo, Colorado which, while pretty wild, was not all that progressive in their thinking!

My mother is the family genealogist and has determined to follow the Yarberry line since the Parker line is pretty muddy before Quanah's mother (who had been kidnapped by Indians when she was a child and raised with them). The Yarberry line wades through the generations and melds with the England line which eventually takes us to a serf with an unpronounceable name before it stops cold.

John Milton Yarberry, my great uncle, became the state superintendent of schools in Colorado as did his son. My grandfather became a raging mean alcoholic who spent 9 of the last 11 years of his life in the Colorado State Hospital for the Insane from whence he walked away boarded a bus and arrived on our doorstep in Killeen, Texas in 1957. I was six years old and had never met him. I was very afraid of him from the stories my mother told.

When he arrived he was clean and sober and, although my mother told him he could rot in hell, my father invited him to live with us. Mom eventually forgave him and he spent the last two years of his life sharing a bedroom with an obnoxious me. He has various and sundry grandchildren spread out over the nation but I was the only one who he ever got to know and I count is as a special blessing to me. His was the first funeral I ever attended and his remains now lie many miles from anyone who even heard his name, in a cemetery in Lampases, Texas.

My mother and father each joined the Church in 1953. She was married to my birth father and lived in Pueblo, Colorado (also my birthplace) and he, married to his first wife, lived in Kalamazoo when he wasn't stationed somewhere in the world. They both went immediately inactive and each got a divorce. They would not meet until 1956.

In that meantime, my mother decided to attend the church where her former in-laws went because she knew it was somehow associated with the Mormons. She went once and there she saw some long-bearded men with chaw-stained lips, preaching a weird religion while they made the women-folk sit in a section apart from them. These were one of the last enclaves of Strang's followers who had escaped from Beaver Island in Michigan and started a few branches of that church in Colorado. It was this connection of which I learned years later, that sparked my interest in studying the life of King James and found him to have been an extremely fascinating man.

My father, after his divorce, returned to the church in which he was raised. It was my Nana's church and the church in which I preformed my first musical solo for money (Nana paid me 10 bucks to sing 'Rock of Ages' when I was 9). She belonged to what Joseph Smith once described as the second-best church. She was a Methodist.

In 1956, my father went TDY to Fort Carson, Colorado and my mother had moved with another single mother, to Denver where she worked in a Woolworth store by day and did some modeling in the evening. Her roommates best friend was a the sister of my father's first wife, who remained a close friend of my dad's even after the divorce. She thought my dad might be a good catch for my mother's roommate and hooked them up.

The roommate was nervous about meeting a GI on a first date, so she invited my mother along. So my mother and dad met in a Colorado honkytonk and in that same honkytonk, 6 weeks later, after they had become engaged, they discussed religion for the first time. This is how my mother tells it:

"Bob (my dad) said that since we were going to be a family, we ought to have a church. I was smoking a Lucky Strike and drinking gin when I told him he wouldn't believe what I was because I wasn't a good one. I told him I was a Mormon.His eyes widened and he smile that famous Bob Quantz smile, took a drag and said I would be more surprised to learn that he was too."

Bob left for Germany but returned a few months later and he and my mother were married in Dallas, Texas, in route to Fort Hood, Texas in what turned out to be a stolen Studebaker with a curly-headed brat in the back seat.

Once at Fort Hood, as Providence would decree, my father's CO was the branch president. Dad and I were playing catch in the street in front of our house one Sunday morning when his CO drove up and strongly suggested that my dad get his wife, himself and me ready for church and be there in an hour.

We went and never looked back. Bob adopted me a year later, just weeks before I was baptized and then we were all sealed in the Hawaiian temple a few years later.

So from my mother, I inherited a legacy of drunks, outlaws, preachers and wild Indians; from my birth father (who remarried a Mormon, became active, had 8 kids and was just released as a temple worker in Ogden) a foggy connection with the early LDS Church and from the man who raised me? Well, that's another story.

(This was originally written December 21, 2005)