KIOWA KEEPER OF THE FLAME

Vivid and gruesome acts of violence cluttered Queton’s mind in his final years. Yet the elderly Kiowa warrior—who’d been born into a Mexican family and captured in childhood by Comanches—felt compelled to recount the most harrowing events of his past before his death. He did so with the person he probably trusted most with his life story, his grandson Parker Paul McKenzie.

The inquisitive McKenzie faithfully documented Queton’s memories for posterity sometime between 1924 and ’26 at the family’s old homestead near Mountain View in Kiowa County, Okla. Fueled by passion and perhaps a sense of duty, McKenzie spent the entirety of his adult life amassing thousands of oral histories, folklore and government documents pertaining to the Kiowa tribe. A self-taught linguist, he also helped develop a phonetic alphabet for the Kiowa language that resulted in the publication of two pioneering books (see sidebar, P. 75).

None of McKenzie’s work touched him as personally as the stories related by his grandfather. They held their intimate conversations fittingly near Rainy