Empire of the Summer Moon

by S. C. Gwynne

  They took her back to Fort Belknap, and thence to Fort Cooper, where she was delivered into the care of the captain’s wife. A Ranger named A. B. Mason, who accompanied her on that trip, recalled that after she arrived, she “sat for a time immovable, lost in profound meditation, oblivious to everything by which she was surrounded, ever and anon convulsed as it were by some powerful emotion which she struggled to suppress.”18 Mason wrote a version of what Cynthia Ann told officials at Fort Cooper, in the February 5, 1861, issue of the Galveston Civilian. His piece was undoubtedly edited, but this is how he quoted her:

  I remember when I was a little girl, being a long time at the house with a picket fence all around; one day some Indians came to the house. They had a white rag on a stick. My father went out to talk to them, they surrounded and killed him, then many other Indians came and fought at the house; several whites were killed; my mother and her four children were taken prisoner; in the evening mother and two of her children were retaken by a white man. My brother died among the Indians of smallpox, I lived with the Indians north of Santa Fe. I have three children.19

  She was wrong about her father talking to the Indians—it was her uncle Benjamin. And she was wrong about her brother John dying of smallpox; he was ransomed back to his family in September 1842. But her memory was extremely accurate about everything else. She may have been confused by the fury of the raid, but she remembered it quite clearly. She remembered watching her father die.

  Ross sent immediately for Cynthia Ann’s uncle Isaac Parker. The women of Fort Cooper, meanwhile, decided to clean the filthy woman up, an enterprise that offered some comic relief amid the tragedy. They found some clothes for her, then got “an old negro mammy” to scrub her down with soap and hot water. Then they combed her hair and let her look at herself in the mirror. “She submitted to all this willingly enough, apparently,” wrote Gholson in his memoir, “until she got a good opportunity to get out the door of the place. When this opportunity occurred she made a dive for the door and got past the negro mammy.” She then headed for her tent, which was two or three hundred yards away, tearing her clothes off as she ran until she had almost nothing on, followed by the mammy frantically waving a washcloth as three bewildered army wives looked on and the child toddled along after them “with nobody paying much attention to her.”20 Nautdah reached her tent, where she managed to find and put on some Comanche clothing. After that, the army wives gave up trying to pretty her up.

  When Isaac Parker arrived, the captive was seated on a pine box with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands. She paid no attention to the assembled men until Parker spoke her name. With that, she stood, looked directly at him, patted her breast and said “Me Cincee Ann.” She repeated it, then resumed her seat. She agreed to answer questions about the raid on Parker’s Fort. She got some of the details wrong, but she remembered correctly that there were five captives, two grown women and three children. Then she was asked to describe Parker’s Fort. She responded by using a stick to draw an outline, using dots and dashes. She then drank from the canteen and dribbled water to round out the portrait, which included the stream that ran behind the fort. “Gentlemen,” Isaac Parker said, “I actually could not make as good a picture of the old fort as she has made.”21

  The Battle of Pease River, as this very small skirmish came to be known rather grandiosely, has long been regarded by Texans as a major historical event. The return of the legendary white squaw offered what was to whites a completely satisfying ending to the great epic tale. Poor Cynthia Ann, the girl who had descended into pagan savagery, was back at last in the arms of her loving and God-fearing family. For the next century, the amazing tale of Cynthia Ann Parker’s Comanche captivity would be taught to schoolchildren in Texas.

  There were some interesting sequels to the battle, as well, with enormous implications for the future of the Comanche tribe. Quanah and his brother survived it. After the fight Goodnight realized that two Indians had left on horseback. The young Ranger and ten scouts tracked them to a Comanche camp in the panhandle. Though Goodnight never learned their identity, the riders were almost certainly Quanah and Peanuts.22 The other child involved in the fight, the nine-year-old Comanche boy, was adopted by Sul Ross and his wife. They named him Pease. He was General Ross’s horse tender in 135 civil war engagements, married a former slave, became a respectable citizen of Waco, and died in 1883.23

  The fight also came to be seen, incorrectly, as the turning point in the war against the Comanches. “Thus was fought the great battle of Pease River,” intoned one of the breathless historical accounts of the day, “with the great Comanche chief, Peta Nocona, with a strong force on one side and the brave Captain Ross with sixty Rangers on the other. In the fight the greater part of the warriors were killed, and such a victory never before had been gained over these Comanches.”24 In Ross’s own description, the battle takes on nearly mythic proportions. “The fruits of this important victory can never be computed in dollars and cents,” he wrote later. “The great Comanche confederacy was forever broken, the blow was decisive, their illustrious chief slept with his fathers and with him were most of his doughty warriors.”25

  This was utter nonsense. Comanche raids in 1864, to take just one year, were the worst in history; 1871 and 1872 were bad years, too. The U.S. Army sent three thousand soldiers against the Comanches in 1874, the largest army ever sent to hunt down hostile Indians. Though Ross had shown great personal courage in his hand-to-hand combat with Peta Nocona, the Indian foes in the Battle of Pease River were mostly women who were shot down while trying to escape on heavily laden horses. “I was in the Pease River fight,” wrote H. B. Rogers in a memoir, “but I am not very proud of it. That was not a battle at all, but just a killing of squaws. One or two bucks and 16 squaws were killed. The Indians were getting ready to leave when we came upon them.”26

  In the weeks and months that followed, the “battle” received wide coverage in Texas newspapers. None of them bothered to mention who the victims were. Considering the anti-Indian hysteria of the moment, it is unlikely that anyone really cared. What is interesting was the virtually universal belief among Texans at the time that Sul Ross, the hero of the battle and the future governor, had saved the poor, unfortunate Cynthia Ann Parker from an ugly fate. That belief would color the histories for a long, long time.

  We will never know how Cynthia Ann Parker felt in the weeks and months after her capture by Sul Ross. There are so few comparable events in American history. But it was painfully apparent from the earliest days that the real tragedy in her life was not her first captivity but her second. White men never quite grasped this. The event that destroyed her life was not the raid at Parker’s Fort in 1836 but her miraculous and much-celebrated “rescue” at Mule Creek in 1860. The latter killed her husband, separated her forever from her beloved sons, and deposited her in a culture where she was more a true captive than she had ever been with the Comanches. In the moments before Ross’s raid, she had been quite as primitive as any other Plains Indian; packing thousands of pounds of buffalo meat onto mules, covered from head to toe in blood and grease, literally immersed in this elemental world that never quite left the Stone Age—a world of ceaseless toil, hunger, constant war, and early death. But also of pure magic, of beaver ceremonies and eagle dances, of spirits that inhabited springs, trees, rocks, turtles, and crows; a place where people danced all night and sang bear medicine songs, where wolf medicine made a person invulnerable to bullets, dream visions dictated tribal policy, and ghosts were alive in the wind. On grassy plains and timbered river bottoms from Kansas to Texas, Cynthia Ann—Nautdah—had drifted in the mystical cycles of the seasons, living in that random, terrifying, bloody, and intensely alive place where nature and divinity became one.

  And then, suddenly, all of it disappeared. Instead of Stone Age camps aswirl in magic and taboo and scented smoke from mesquite lodge fires, she found herself sitting on taffeta chairs in drawing rooms on the outer margins of the In
dustrial Revolution, being interrogated by polite uncomprehending white men who believed in a single God and in a supremely rational universe where everything could be explained. This new culture was every bit as alien as the one she confronted after the attack on Parker’s Fort. It was as though she had walked yet again through a door into another world, quite as complete as the one she had left and, in all of its mystifying details, completely different.

  Isaac Parker quickly satisfied himself that the woman Ross had captured was his long-lost niece Cynthia Ann. He decided immediately that he would take her and her daughter, Prairie Flower, back home with him to Birdville (now Haltom City), just north of Fort Worth. Both of her parents were dead. Silas had of course perished in the raid on Parker’s Fort. Her mother, Lucy, had died in 1852 after a life filled with bad marriages (three after Silas), poor health, and a brutal five-year legal battle over her husband’s estate.27 Cynthia Ann’s brother Silas Jr. and sister, Orlena, having survived a rough childhood—Cynthia Ann, ironically, probably had a better life—were married and living in Texas. But it was Silas’s brother Isaac who decided to take his niece in. (Cynthia Ann’s uncle James, the old searcher, was still alive but curiously absent in all of this; perhaps he gave up when he heard that she did not want to be rescued.)

  They soon departed, accompanied by the former Comanche captive Anton Martinez, who acted as interpreter, along with two Rangers. They stopped on the way at Fort Belknap, where a more successful effort was made to clean the mother and daughter up, and where Prairie Flower played happily with other children. She was by all accounts a bumptious and “sprightly” child. She was dark-skinned and strikingly pretty. Everyone liked her. Cynthia Ann herself was sturdily built, with short-cropped, medium brown hair; wide-set, striking light-blue eyes; and a mouth that seemed set in anger, or resignation, or both. She was not pretty, nor was she especially unattractive; in calico she looked in most ways like a typical Anglo pioneer woman of the day, a bit stout and rather more worn-looking than her urban counterparts at a comparable age. She was also, recognizably, a Parker. One account put her at five feet seven inches and one hundred forty pounds, which would have made her a giant among Comanche women. She and her tall, muscular husband must have cut quite a figure in Comanche camps, just as her son Quanah would later on.

  They passed through Weatherford—the seat of Parker County, where the worst of Peta Nocona’s raids had taken place—and then stopped in Fort Worth, where Cynthia Ann became an instant celebrity. It is not known why the travelers stopped here. Some accounts say it was to have a photograph taken, but the first known photograph of her—a tintype, actually—was not taken until a month later in Austin.28 Whatever the reason, her arrival caused a great commotion as residents of Tarrant County (who totaled 6,020 that year) clamored to see the famous captive and her child. Her arrival was considered such an important event that the local children were let out of school. They came in groups to gawk at the terrified captives, who were on display in front of a general store in downtown Fort Worth. It was a sort of freak show: Cynthia Ann was bound with rope and set out atop a large box so that everyone could see her. One can only wonder what role her uncle Isaac, politician that he was, played in it. According to one witness:

  She was not dressed in Indian costume but wore a torn calico dress. Her hair was bronzed by the sun. Her face was tanned, and she made a pathetic figure as she stood there, viewing the crowds that swarmed about her. The tears were streaming down her face, and she was muttering in the Indian language.29

  Texans could not get enough of her. There were many newspaper accounts of her return, all of which were uniformly obsessed with the idea that a pretty little nine-year-old white girl from a devout Baptist family had been transformed into a pagan savage who had mated with a redskin and borne his children and forgotten her mother tongue. She was thus, according to the morals of the day, grotesquely compromised. She had forsaken the virtues of Christianity for the wanton immorality of the Indian. That was the attraction. And all the stories assumed that everything she had done had been forced upon her. That she had suffered grievous mistreatment, had been whipped and beaten and had led a lonely and desperate existence. People simply did not believe that a Christian white woman had gone along with it voluntarily. One paper, the Clarksville Northern Standard, observed later that “her body and arms bear the marks of having been cruelly treated.”30 Yet there is nothing to suggest that she was cruelly treated after the first few days of her captivity, as her cousin Rachel Plummer had described them. She was the ward of a chief, later his wife. The scars may have resulted from the practice among Comanche women of cutting themselves in mourning, often on the arms and breasts. Apparently no white people wanted to think too hard about the implications of the lovely mixed-race girl named Prairie Flower, whom her mother obviously adored.

  After the carnival interlude in town, the party continued to Birdville. Here Isaac lived in a spacious “double log” cabin that was considered for many years the finest house in Tarrant County. It is not clear exactly what he thought he was going to accomplish with Cynthia Ann and her daughter. Perhaps he was simply doing what he considered to be his family duty. Perhaps he saw himself as her deliverer, imagining the day when Cynthia Ann, grateful and weeping, would embrace Jesus and forsake her savage ways.

  Nothing of the sort happened. Cynthia Ann’s repatriation was in fact a disaster. She was not only unrepentant. She was actively, and incessantly, hostile to her captors. She tried repeatedly to escape with her daughter, sometimes making it far into the woods and requiring a search party to find her. She was so intent on leaving that Isaac had to lock her in the house when he was away. As her legal guardian, he was empowered to do so. Cynthia Ann was being treated as though she were crazy: An entirely “free” white woman, thirty-three years old and from a prominent family, was being forcibly restrained so that she could not return to her sons and the culture that raised her. Her family believed that, owing to a life in which they assumed she had been sexually abused and beaten and enslaved, she was unable to know what was best for her. Cynthia Ann, meanwhile, always had a clear and quite correct sense of her own interests. Such treatment must have been terrible to endure.

  She could not, or would not, speak English, though in any case what she remembered would have been rudimentary. She would sit for hours and hours on the wide porch of Isaac’s house weeping and nursing Prairie Flower. She refused to stop her pagan devotions. One of her relatives described her ritual of worship:

  She went out to a smooth place on the ground, cleaned it off very nicely and made a circle and a cross. On the cross she built a fire, burned some tobacco, and then cut a place on her breast and let the blood drop onto the fire. She then lit her pipe and blowed smoke toward the sun and assumed an attitude of the most sincere devotion. She afterwards said through an interpreter that this was her prayer to her great spirit to enable her to understand and appreciate that these were her relatives and kindred she was among.31

  The family and neighbors retaliated by demanding that Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower give up wearing Indian clothing and insisting that Prairie Flower be given instruction in Scripture.32 Cynthia Ann was uncooperative. Things did not go well.

  In late January 1861, a little more than a month after the Pease River fight, Isaac Parker took his charges to Austin to try to convince the Texas legislature to give them a pension—a sort of compensation for the hardships they had endured. This was a clever idea, but would require a good deal of political grease, and he was exactly the sort of man who could pull it off. As a lifelong politician and elected official, Isaac knew everyone in the capital. He and Sam Houston, then governor of Texas, were old friends. They had fought together in the War of 1812. Later, Houston had sent Isaac as an emissary to Washington to gather support for the Texas revolution.

  The Parkers arrived in Austin on a chilly January day to find the city firmly in the grip of secession fever. Abraham Lincoln had been elected president the previous fall,
and anti-Union sentiment in Texas was in full cry. Austin was its center. Throughout the month of January secessionists marched up and down the rutted dirt of Congress Avenue, the city’s broad main street that was newly lined with sturdy limestone buildings. It climbed gently from the Colorado River toward the imposing new three-story domed state capitol, which was fronted by marble Ionic columns and a huge portico. The secessionists were in their glory. They were an unruly bunch, carrying torches and signs that condemned Lincoln and his “abolitionist” government. They held parades and marches on a moment’s notice. One featured a loud brass band, a long line of carriages containing ladies who fluttered Texas flags, and a boisterous contingent of men on horseback, all led by Ranger Rip Ford, who pranced down the avenue on a white stallion.33 Texas flags flew everywhere, and there was even talk of a second republic. The air was cold and bracing, and Texans were in a high mood.

  The secession convention, which began on January 28, featured an Olympian fight between Governor Houston, who opposed breaking away from the United States, and almost everyone else, who favored it. The old statesman delivered one of the greatest speeches of his career, pleading that “it is not unmanly to pause and at least endeavor to avert the calamity.” People listened respectfully to him. And then voted 171–6 in favor of secession.34 That took place on February 1, 1861. On April 12, Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, signaling the start of the Civil War.