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)

Some Fishing Memories

Autumn is nearly here.

Hunters look forward to this time of year because most of the game seasons begin. I look forward to Fall because most of the anglers crowding the waters are also hunters and their leaving for forests and fields brings peace and often solitude for those who prefer fishing when the air begins to chill.

Perhaps it's this chill that has me conjuring up old memories of rivers, streams and lakes of my past. I can't begin a recounting them though, without stating clearly that I hope my best fishing memories are waiting for me in the future.

My Earliest Memory

This experience happened so long ago that I am not sure my memory is of the event itself or of the various retelling of the story by the adults who were there with me. I wish it were more vivid because I feel wonderful thinking of it, even through the mists of my mind.

I was very young, not yet in school. Thinking of this now humbles me a little because I am not sure I would have taken someone so young on this kind of fishing trip. If I am not mistaken, there were three adult men and me. Two of the men were my uncles Tom and Walt. The other man was probably by biological father as this event occurred before my parents divorced. His face, however, is unrecognizable in my memory. Perhaps because he left when I was 4 and I never saw him again until I was 27.

I remember leaving in the late afternoon from Pueblo, Colorado, where we all lived at the time. Gear and people were loaded in my Uncle Walt's Army Surplus Jeep and we headed toward the mountains.

Anyone who has ever been to Pueblo knows it is not the kind of town shown in the travel brochures that entice tourists to Colorado. For years the main industry in town consisted of a Nabisco plant and a steel mill (pictured above). For Mormon history buffs, Pueblo was a layover town for the Mormon Battalion and the first white baby born there was born to the wife of the presiding elder in the area.

It sits in the desert. The mountains, on clear days, can be seen in the far distance. It is almost never green.

Bisected by the Arkansas River, one side of town, in those days, was reserved for the whites and the other for the Latinos. Only rarely did one tribe venture onto the land of the other. There was a large Italian contingent then. My mother told me that Pueblo was a hide-out for mobsters on the run but I suspect that was more legend than reality.

My bio-father, at the time, recently furloughed from the Navy, was working for the National Biscuit Company, as he calls it. Even today he won't refer to the plant as a Nabisco factory. I don't know why unless he's a little ashamed he ever made crackers.

Uncle Walt worked at the mill and my Uncle Tom was a roofing contractor. I am much closer to my uncles because they didn't leave when my bio-father did.

I am careful to differentiate between my dad and my biological father. Bio-dad's name is Fred Ferguson. He is a good man. I know him pretty well. After he left us, he remarried and raised 8 kids. My dad was Bob Quantz. He adopted me when I was 7 and never left. He wasn't a perfect father but he was there.

I seem to remember sitting in the back seat of the Jeep as the sun began to set and as we entered some canyon pass on some two-track road. I remember it being very dark and I was convinced we were traveling on the edge of some deep and dangerous ravine where, with one mistake by my Uncle Walt, we would careen to a fiery death. I am sure I fell asleep before we arrived at the cabin.

I really don't remember arriving at the cabin but I think I remember waking up to the aroma of frying bacon. Only one adult was in the place and I can't remember which one. The other two were in the stream trying to augment the bacon with freshly-caught trout. I headed to the stream all by myself.

Now this is something I would have never let a 4 year-old of mine do; run off alone in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains, but it was a different time.

I found one of the men as he was landing a small Rainbow trout. He let me take the rod and reel the fish to the net. I remember being excited but knowing somehow, this was not really my first fish. It wasn't my fish at all.

Later that day, I was carried to a rock in the middle of a stream whose name is not part of the shadows. There I fished with my own Zebco rod and reel and there I caught my first fish.

Somewhere in the books of remembrance either in the Ferguson garage or the Quantz attic, there is a snapshot of me holding that fish. The look on my face was really no different than it is now when I land a fish. I am still 4 years old, on a rock, in the middle of the stream.

The First Time with Dad

My dad - that is my real father; the man who raised me... Bob Quantz - was more a hunter than a fisherman and he wasn't all that great a hunter. From the first time he took me hunting - rabbits on the ranch in Lampasas - to the last time, just a year or so before he died, on a dear hunt in Central Michigan, I was much more successful a hunter. When I was in college in Kansas, he and I went pheasant hunting 5 times and I never saw him take a bird. I remember him killing exactly two deer in 30 years and one of them was with the Plymouth.

I was always confused that he couldn't seem to hit the side of a barn because, as a professional soldier, he has competed on rifle and pistol teams and won most of them. It was only after his death that it came to me that he really loved being in the outdoors but found no thrill in the kill. When I figured that out, I all but gave up hunting because I have never found it either.

As lousy a hunter my dad was, he was worse as a fisherman except when it came to pure, cane-pole, baitfishing. He tried flyfishing and just couldn't get the timing down. He tried using all the hot lures with spinning gear and he would, on the first or second cast, get hung up and have to snap the line. Give him a cane pole, with a hook, bobber and a worm and he was happy and successful.

Shortly after he and my mother were married and we all moved to Fort Hood, Texas, on one sweaty Saturday, he asked me if I wanted to go fishing with him. I grabbed my little tackle box and my rod and reel as I cheered my answer. I was happy to go fishing, of course, but also elated that I would not be doing my normal Saturday chores as barked out by my mother.

I remember we drove down a country road somewhere outside Lampasas where we lived, and parked at the side of the road where a bridge crossed a river. We then walked down the bank to the shoreline. He found a comfortable perch and swung his line into the water. "Go ahead." he said, "But watch out for snakes."

It was a worthy warning as the place was crawling with Cottonmouths and Daimondbacks. The river was also crawling with fish. It didn't matter what lure I threw, something took it. I caught fish, one after another, for two hours and found my way back to my dad, who had also collected a nice stringer.

He asked me if I was ready to go. I remember clearly that my brain wanted to stay but I wasn't feeling all that well for some reason, so I sad I was. We packed up and I mentally prepared myself for the fish-cleaning that would happen when we got home.

Once back at the house, my dad said I wasn't looking good and told me to wash up and go to bed. If I had not been so sick, I would have been happy I didn't have to share in the fish-cleaning. I went immediately to sleep.

I awoke to the sound of my mother screaming and pointing at my face. My dad came into my room and got a look of his face that scared me. I finally stumbled to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. My head was the size and shape of a basketball. Something was seriously wrong.

My folks rushed me to the emergency room at the base hospital where I was immediately admitted. A few hours later my parents were told I had something called Nephritis; a deadly kidney disease. The doctors explained that it would take two weeks of heavy antibiotics before they could even tell if I was going to live and that, if I did, I would be years in recovery and rehabilitation.

My folks had only recently become active again in the Church and my dad didn't have the priesthood yet. Two GI's who were returned missionaries in our branch were summoned to give me a blessing. They did. I was out of the hospital in 6 weeks and have never had a single problem since because of the illness.

The next time my dad and I went fishing was in Hawaii. On our way to the home of the man who would take us my dad made me promise I wouldn't get some fatal disease.

Security and Power

Helen Keller said "Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature,nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable."

When I first read this, I didn't agree with her but the more I thought about it and the more I remembered her life's experiences, I was able to put the comment in its proper context. Helen Keller wasn't advocating the pursuit of dangerous activities or paths, but promoting a way of life that is not paralyzed by fear.

By "free spirits" I believe she was referring to those people who are not hampered by convention that has no meaning and not to those who abandon principles to participate in hedonism.

I remember clearly in the Sixties, when the term "free spirit" was bandied about by those who determined their world needed to be amplified by drugs and alcohol because they had difficulty seeing beauty in the realities of life. In truth, they were not free at all, but rather shackled by dependence on artificial happiness and counterfeit joy.

I have been watching the latest Ken Burns documentary on PBS, called, "The War". Here we see a horrible history of men killing other men for the spectrum of reasons both honorable and sinister. Amid the terrible tragedy are flowers of righteous purpose as he tells the stories of heroes who would not think themselves as such.

Last week my daughter attended the funeral for a fallen soldier in her community. As I read her account, I saw blossoms of hope amid unspeakable tragedy and sadness. I have asked for heaven's blessing to be with this hero's family as the hero has, no doubt, ascended into heaven for no man hath greater love...

Shortly after reading Helen Keller's words, I read other words, words written by a prophet of God.

Ezra Taft Benson said " When obedience ceases to be an irritant and becomes our quest,
Then God will endow us with power from on High."

It occurred to me that this might be the key to finding joy and freedom to sustain us in this weary world. The question then, is, "How do we do it?". The answer, I believe, is found in Helen Keller's philosophy of living life courageously.

It takes no courage to ignore principles. It requires no bravery to follow the whims of the crowds when they abandon eternal principles in favor of indulging themselves on the tempting fruits offered up by Satan with his lie that those who follow him "will not die".

It takes monumental courage to say, in the face of terrible trials, "...nevertheless, Thy will be done."

I pray that God will grant me the courage to face the world with a desire for absolute obedience and that He might touch my children with that righteous desire as well.

Worth a Thousand Words