Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Myth Busters?


Yesterday, as I was reprinting an entry I wrote years ago during my first attempt at blogging, I came across the following comment offered by someone I don't know:


"Quanah died 23 Feb 1911 and Mah-Cheeta-Wookey died 02 Jan 1914. I ahve [sic] reviewed all of the Kiowa-Comanche Agency census files, one each year from 1894-1937. All of Quanah's children and all of the orphan Indian and white children are accounted for. None were taken by any of the missionaries. According to census files 1900-1920 and Rodney's WWI draft registration - Rodney Herbert Yarberry was the son of John Milton Yarberry (1854-1945) and Cynthia R England.


Uh-dah (Comanche for thanks)

Jim Yarbrough

Member/researcher Quanah Parker Historical Preservation Society"


Now, I am reasonably certain that Mr. Yarbrough had the best of intentions here, even if I can't imagine what they were. Still, why would anything think it proper to make an attempt to destroy a family legend just for the sake of accuracy?


I ask this question given the fact that in the blog I stated clearly that the Parker references were part of "family legend".


Since Rodney Herbert Yarberry was my grandfather, I think I might already know the facts, as boring as they might be. The facts, however, are not all that great a story.


Then I had a thought. I wondered how accurate the information offered by Mr. Yarbrough could possibly be with regard to the children of Quanah Parker since so much of Quanah's life is a mixture of hyperbole and legend? The claim is made, for example, that he never lost a battle against the white man. I guess his surrender to General Mackenzie after being threatened with extermination doesn't count as a loss.


He is credited with starting the North American Church Movement, famed for its use of peyote in its rituals but his son White Parker, became a Methodist minister which, in my mind, underscores the possibility of a Methodist connection to my grandfather's father.


One source claims Parker had 5 wives and another is adamant that he had 8, still another claims 7 and yet another claims he had 6. All of these sources make claims of being experts on the life and genealogy of Quanah Parker. All of the sources state he had "at least" 25 children. This means that 25 have been accounted for but clearly leaves open the possibility of other for which there has been no accounting.


So, with all due respect to Mr. Yarbrough, his claims are really no more provable than are mine and mine make a better story...


So, perhaps the family legend was invented by my mother to create some sensation of celebrity in her life; a life marred by dysfunction and mental illness; an early life of an abusive, alcoholic father and a vicious mother. She, perhaps, finds some value in being an Indian princess.


I want to offer my thanks, though, to Jim Yarbrough, for his eagerness to correct the record. I should be grateful because it's quite likely Jim and I are distant cousins since the name "Yarberry" is a derivation of Yarbrough. Of course, if that's true, and since he is related to Quanah though Cynthia - Quanah's mother, perhaps my mother is a princess after all.


I promise that the next time I wrote a story about the Yarberry clan, I will include a tale of the snivelling mythbuster, Cousin Jim.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Of Comanches. Methodists and Strangite Mormons


Written originally on Wednesday, December 21, 2005. In the original entry I made up names I did not know for the sake of the narrative. I have since learned them and they are correct here.

Quanah Parker was an active polygamist. There is historical proof he had seven wives 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 John Yarberry and his wife Sarah (Gambel), en route from Benton Country Arkansas to the Colorado territory in 1854, 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 Thomas, and John Milton Yarberry, my great-grandfather. He was older than Thomas by 4 years.

As the boys matured, John Milton Yarberry was said to have headed to Colorado looking for a man who was "borrowing" his name. A man going by Milt Yarberry had been a rather notorious gunfighter in Southern Colorado and New Mexico and had been hired in 1880 as the first town marshall for Albuquerque. After shooting to death, an unarmed citizen, the city hanged old Milt on February 9, 1883. Before John left, however, he married Cynthia England in Beton Arkansas in 1870. He took her with him and they eventually settled in Avondale, Colorado where my grandfather, Rodney Herbert was born on October 1, 1896.

My grandfather married three women, although he was not a polygamist. His first wife was Helen Fulton. They were married in May of 1915 and had three children, Robert, Rebecca and Helen. His second, an Indian woman known only as Tillie - as far as anyone knows they had no children - and finally my grandmother, Leota Winona Park (Miller). Together they had two children, but the first died young and the second was my mother, Roxana Lee who hates the name Roxana and goes by "Lee".

Grandpa inherited two stepdaughters, however, my Aunts Eileen and Nadine - known to all as "Denny".

My grandmother and grandfather met when their two husbands decided to meet weekly to play cards with the wives. Apparently Helen 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 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 unpronouncable name before it stops cold.J

John Milton, a great uncle, became the state superintendant 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 pretended to forgive 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 cemetary 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 is 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.

I Found the Old Blog!

I am adding here, now, some older stories from my first blog.

I will try to edit them to make things more current when speaking in the present.

Bury Me Not On the Lone Prairie...


Driving home from Ludington on Sunday, during one of those stretches of silence, I thought of the cemeteries I have visited, for various reasons, over the years. While some are etched in my memory for valid reasons, others are there reflecting the mundane and even frivolous.


The first cemetery I remember is one located in Lampasas, Texas. It's the Oak Hill Cemetery and happens to hold the title of "Largest in the County" with "over 5,000 identifiable graves" (The Lampasas County Historical Commission). One of those identifiable graves is home to the bones and dust of one Rodney Herbert Yarberry; my maternal grandfather.


Given my mother's deep and painful issues with her father, I suspect being able to identify his grave is unimportant as I doubt anyone has ever visited it since the funeral and interment.


My memories of the man, however, are all sweet but I never really knew him until after his stint in the Colorado State Hospital that finally "cured" him of his alcoholism and he showed up in Killeen looking for a place to lay his weary head at his daughter's house.


My mother would have refused without guilt but my father - who hadn't know him "then" either - convinced her that he recent reactivation in the Church really demanded she relent and even forgive the man that had caused her so much pain. Since he died in 1960, I wonder if she has managed to forgive him.


When she speaks of him in public, it's always with warm accolades and the pretense of affection as she has never been able to reveal the truth of her life in public. This is a trait she passed on to me and one that has taken me decades to overcome and finally find some semblance of peace with who I am and the turmoil created by a broken family.


My grandfather and I shared a room for the last two years of his life and he shared with me all the stories that had survived in his pickled mind. I am sure that some of them were true, even if they were embellished.


The tornado in Colorado last week reminded me of one.


When he was a young man, he took a job as a cowboy in western Colorado. One spring day he was riding the range when a storm exploded, seemingly from nowhere. He told me of riding full-gallop toward some shelter and being intercepted by a funnel cloud that lifted him and his horse into the air and set them gently down several miles away; him still in the saddle and neither he nor the horse any worse for the flight. When I was 8, that was the critical part of the story. Now, however, I find it so fascinating that he was a real cowboy at as time when the cowboy life was fading into history. It is wonderful to me that the part of the story that is true, is now the most important part of the tale.


I remember him telling me about a time he and his brother were playing in a barn when a bucket of kerosene tipped from a shelf and the liquid poured into his brother's left ear and out the right. I also remember being extremely disappointed when I attempted the recreate the event with a cup of water in our bathroom sink and all I got for the trouble was water in my ear that took two days of intermittently jumping up and down to release.


I remember three women singing "O My Father" at his grave site just before they lowered his coffin into the hole. I decided to write a song called "O My Grandfather" but I never got around to it.


I have also never got around to returning to his cemetery, but I want to. I hope wanting to, counts in my favor.


I don't think I have ever seen his wife's - my grandmother's - grave. I am not even sure where it is.


I have only one, very vague, memory of her. I was on a lawn outside of a hospital and she was on one of the upper floors, waving at me from a window. I am not sure why, but I have no real desire to search her out. She doesn't seem like she's a part of me or my history. I am not bragging about that feeling. It's really wrong of me and something I ought to change.


The only woman I have ever really considered my grandmother is not related to me at all, by blood. She is the mother of my mother's third husband, the man who adopted me and raised me as his own, William Quantz. Her name at death was Alma Holstein and she is buried in Kalamazoo. I have visited her grave only once since her burial. I should drop by the next time I am in town.


Her son, my dad, is buried in Fort Custer National Cemetery near Battle Creek. I have visited his grave many times; generally around Memorial Day, but not this year. This year we visited my wife's father's grave in Ludington where his widow placed a flower arrangement next to his headstone and I watched her cry. Her home is a shrine to their marriage and her memories are always colored by the fact that he is no longer living.


One of my favorite cemeteries is the one located on Fort Douglas in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is where my brother is buried.


It took me years to build the courage to visit the grave as I felt, for years, that I was, in part, the cause of his early death at 3 years old. When I finally screwed up the guts, it was a wonderful, cleansing experience. As I stood and wept at his grave I almost heard an angelic choir singing:


" And should we die before our journey's through... Happy Day! All in Well!"


He died early in his mortal journey but I walked away assured that his work there was more important than his work here.


Two years ago, Deb, Sam, Kathy and their children and I visited Robbie's grave. When we got there I noticed a dry, faded rose on top of his stone. Someone unknown to me or anyone in my family, had visited Robbie's grave. I was deeply touched by this action and have, since, made a small effort to look at the stones of strangers when I am in cemeteries and to offer a small prayer for them and their families.


When we were leaving the cemetery in Ludington on Saturday evening, I noticed a young man stretched out on the ground near a headstone and he was talking toward it. A thousand stories flashed through my mind as I watched him. I settled on one that identified him as the only son of a parents who loved him; a son who was rebellious and who tested the patience but never the love, of the man and women buried there. I imagined him to be the prodigal that returned too late for the fatted calf, the ring or the party. I pretended that he turned his life around after their deaths and visited their grave often to give a report on his life and achievements.


As unlikely the story is, it still is a good one for me.


On the trip home, Sunday afternoon, Deb and I took a side trip, off the expressway and onto some country roads. Somewhere on that side trip, we passed a little, family cemetery, ancient and weathered, on a farm somewhere between Pentwater and Silver Lake.


Wouldn't it be grand if families could be buried near each other again?


I would like to be buried next to my wife and near by children and their children so, in the Resurrection, we might embrace with our newly perfected bodies. As it is, Deb and I will probably be together but we'll have to travel to see the kids.


I am pretty sure, however, that travel then, will be quick as thinking it and that distance, like time, will mean nothing.