This month Texas Monthly publisheda brief featureon the Comanche Chief Quanah Parker’s headdress. The most well-known of the Comanche, Quanah’s name is still spoken with reverence in West Texas. He died in 1911, but the headdress he wore is now in the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, in Canyon, Texas.
The headdress is “a magnificent assemblage of 62 golden eagle feathers, each trimmed at the top with red turkey or rooster hackles and horsehair.”
The feathers and hackles are attached to a felt cap and a trailer that falls nearly to the floor. The headgear was a gift to the museum in 1960 from Topay, Quanah’s last surviving wife. In the words of Lonn Taylor: The headdress is “a fitting memento of a man who spent his life trying to guide his people along the white man’s road while preserving their identity as Comanche.”