Women of the Frontier

by Brandon Marie Miller

  For the next five days, the Comanche and the captives rode north, and for five days the Parkers had no food and only enough water to keep them alive. Each night they were bound with leather, face down on the ground, the leather pulled so tight it cut into their flesh.

  On the sixth day, the Comanche separated the captives. Elizabeth Kellogg was traded to a band of Kichai Indians. Cynthia Ann and her brother John went to one band of Comanche, while Rachel and James Pratt went to another. They soon tore James from Rachel’s arms. “He reached out his hands toward me, which were covered with blood, and cried, “Mother, Mother, oh, Mother!” I looked after him as he was borne from me, and I sobbed aloud. This was the last I ever heard of my little Pratt.”18

  The Comanche took Rachel further north, probably into what is today Colorado. She was given to an older man and became the slave of his wife and daughter, who beat her and burned her. While tending horses and scraping and tanning buffalo hides, she picked up the Comanche language as best she could.

  The lowest point of Rachel’s existence came after she gave birth in October 1836 to the child she’d been carrying at the time of the raid. Her master felt Rachel’s care of the child wasted too much time. One morning, while several men held Rachel back, the Comanche killed her seven-week-old baby. “My little innocent one was not only dead,” Rachel later wrote, “but literally torn to pieces.”19

  Every week, the Comanche moved on. At night, the men danced. Rachel listened to tribal councils, watched the rituals, and noted the tribe’s taboos. But the harsh life—the loss of her two sons, the work, the abuse—robbed her of hope. She longed to die but couldn’t end her own life. She tried instead to goad her Comanche tormentors into killing her. Rachel refused to obey an order from her “young mistress,” and when the woman charged at her, Rachel went even further—she fought back. The two women rolled on the ground, fighting and screaming, and Rachel beat the Comanche woman on the head with a buffalo bone until parts of her skull lay exposed. Rachel expected at any second “to feel a spear reach my heart from one of the Indians.”20

  The group of Comanche men gathered around, yelling, but did not interfere in the battle. Rachel emerged victorious. “I had her past hurting me and indeed nearly past breathing, when she cried out for mercy,” Rachel wrote.21 Afterward, Rachel bathed the woman’s bloody face, and for the first time, her captor seemed friendly.

  The older woman, however, told Rachel she would burn her to death, and Rachel once again fought back. The two women locked in battle inside the teepee, moving over and around a blazing fire that burned them both, and they broke the teepee’s lodge pole in the struggle. Twice Rachel held the old woman in the flames before the fight rolled outside the teepee into a crowd of men. No one stopped them, and again Rachel turned the tables on her captor.

  Twelve chiefs decided that, as punishment, Rachel would have to replace the broken lodge pole. She refused to do so unless the other two women helped. The council agreed; Rachel was amazed that they’d treated her as an equal. “They respected bravery more than anything, I learned. I wish I had known it sooner,” she wrote. “After that, I took up for myself, and fared much the better for it.”22

  Rachel hatched a new plan to escape her captivity. She tried to encourage a Mexican who traded with the Comanche to buy her. “I told him that even if my father and husband were dead, I knew I had enough land in Texas to fully indemnify him; but he did not try to buy me.”23 However, the next time Mexican traders came to the camp, Rachel got the result she’d prayed for: in August 1837, her Comanche master sold her.

  The “Comanchero” traders hauled Rachel on a long journey to Santa Fe, which was still part of Mexico at the time. The men had standing orders from a white couple named William and Mary Donoho to offer any price for white women held captive by Indians. The Donohos took Rachel in and promised a swift return to her relatives. But an uprising among the Pueblo Indians forced the Donohos to flee. They trekked right across Comanche country in a two-month journey back to their Missouri home, and Rachel traveled with them.

  During Rachel’s captivity, her father, James Parker, had followed any tips he’d heard about a white female amongst the Indians. He made five trips between 1836 and 1837 and covered perhaps 5,000 miles in a fruitless search for his lost daughter and grandson. He successfully recovered his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Kellogg, three months after her capture with Rachel and the children, by paying a ransom of $150 to a group of Delaware Indians.

  Exhausted after his last search, James sent his son-in-law to visit the Red River trading posts in search of fresh news. Finally, they heard a tip that a Mrs. Plummer had been taken to Independence, Missouri! Rachel’s brother-in-law hastened north to find her. As soon as she saw him, she asked, “Are my husband and father alive?” Yes, he told her. Then she asked after her mother and siblings. They too had survived.

  Rachel Plummer’s ordeals had carried her thousands of miles, crisscrossing the Great Plains. And now, in the dead of winter, she made yet another trek, this time back to Texas. On February 19, 1838, she arrived at her father’s home north of Houston. The sight of her shocked everyone. “She presented a most pitiable appearance,” noted James Parker, “her emaciated body was covered with scars, the evidence of the savage barbarity to which she had been subject during her captivity.”24

  Rachel’s husband must have welcomed his wife home, though this was not always the case with female captives who had been compromised sexually. Though society might pity them, returned female captives usually lived in the shadows of shame. Another female captive, Matilda Lockhart, explained that she had been burned, disfigured, beaten—and had suffered even worse. She’d been “utterly degraded and could not hold her head up again.”25

  But Rachel and her husband soon began another family. She wrote of her ordeal, published as Rachel Plummer’s Narrative of Twenty-One Months Servitude as a Prisoner Among the Comanche Indians. She not only told of her fate but also described the lands and customs of the Comanche, offering details of their culture during their last free decades on the plains. Rachel’s little book proved a sensation.

  But Rachel’s troubles were not yet over. Late in her pregnancy, vigilantes accused James Parker of murder. He wrote the governor requesting help, for he knew this lawless band had held mock trials and hanged other victims. The threats forced the family to flee their home. Exposure to the elements weakened Rachel, probably nine months pregnant at that point and having never quite recovered from her captivity. She gave birth on January 4, 1839, and died on March 19, followed shortly in death by her infant son.

  Rachel Plummer always thought her little boy James Pratt had died. She did not live to see her son returned to the family along with his cousin, John Parker. The boys were found in 1843, ages eight and 13. Now, only one captive from the raid of May 19, 1836, remained missing: John’s sister, Cynthia Ann Parker.

  Cynthia Ann Parker

  Cynthia Ann Parker vanished into the great sea of the plains on that morning in May, ripped from her mother while her father was cut down by Comanche raiders. With the other captives, she endured beatings and starvation in those first terrifying days.

  But unlike Rachel Plummer, enslaved and abused, nine-year-old Cynthia Ann found a new home and a new life, adopted into the Comanche world. And there she lived for the next 24 years, forgetting her English language, marrying a Comanche chief and warrior, and bearing three beloved children. Indeed, for nearly 10 years, no white person saw Cynthia Ann or heard a word about her.

  Cynthia Ann Parker with her daughter Prairie Flower, around 1862. Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, Texas

  She never left any written record of her life among the Comanche. The best historians can do is base her experiences from age nine until 19 on the stories of two other girls, who, like Cynthia Ann, were abducted during raids and adopted into the tribe. The Comanche stole Bianca Babb, called Banc, in 1866. She saw her mother stabbed, shot with arrows, and scalped, and she witnessed another f
emale captive endure “unspeakable violation, humiliation, and involuntary debasement.”26

  But Bianca was given to a Comanche woman, a widow with no children, who cherished the girl, “never scolded me, and seldom ever corrected me,” wrote Babb. On cold winter nights, the woman warmed Bianca before the fire, then wrapped her in a buffalo robe and tucked her into bed. Babb wrote of her “Squaw Mother,” “She … seemed to care as much for me as if I were her very own child.”27

  Life as part of an extended clan often seemed like a carefree holiday to Bianca. She played, ate informal meals that included spearing meat with skewers, learned to swim, and watched war dances. But there was also work, packing and constantly moving camp, and collecting water and wood. During her seven months of captivity, Babb learned the Comanche language and shared the deprivation of Indian life when there was not enough to eat. But she was treated with kindness, always defended the Comanche in later years, and in 1897, applied for official adoption into the Comanche tribe.

  Malinda Ann “Minnie” Caudle’s story of her 1868 capture survives in a single interview she gave. When Minnie’s two aunts were raped and killed by the Comanche, the Indian woman caring for Minnie shielded her from viewing the horrors. Like Bianca Babb, she was treated with kindness by her adopted mother, who cooked meat just to Minnie’s liking and told her stories by the campfire. Like Babb, Minnie was ransomed and returned to her family after six months.

  Minnie, too, defended the Comanche as good people. As children, they recognized humanity in the Comanche that white adults—often victims of torture and rape—could not find. Cynthia Ann Parker, who was not ransomed and returned within six months, probably experienced similar treatment based on kindness that grew into a sense of belonging to the tribe.

  In the spring of 1846, a Texas Indian agent named Leonard Williams was sent by the US government to invite Comanche chiefs to treaty talks. He had another mission—to find out if the Comanche held any captives in their camp and to purchase those captives if possible. At some point Williams learned that a blue-eyed woman lived in the camp. Could this be the missing Parker girl?

  Williams tried to purchase Cynthia Ann’s freedom but found his offers adamantly rebuffed. A letter to the commissioner of Indian affairs in Washington reported, “The young woman is claimed by one of the Comanche as his wife. From the influence of her alleged husband, or from her own inclination, she is unwilling to leave the people with whom she associates.”28

  The white world found this explanation—that 19-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker refused to return to white society—a shock. In June 1846, the Houston Telegraph and Texas Register reported Williams’s meeting, trumpeting the news that “Miss Parker has married an Indian chief and is so wedded to the Indians mode of life that she is unwilling to return to her white kindred.” The paper lamented, “Even if she should be restored to her kindred here, she would probably take advantage of the first opportunity and flee away to the wilds of northern Texas.”29

  Cynthia Ann—called Nautdah, meaning “someone found”—lived as the wife of Peta Nocona, a warrior and chief who’d participated in the raid on Parker’s Fort in 1836. Her husband owned many horses, giving his family wealth that matched his status as a fearless warrior and able hunter. Cynthia Ann shared her husband with one other wife, a full-blooded Comanche woman.

  During her years with the Comanche, Cynthia Ann roamed the Great Plains across Texas and Oklahoma. She lived the hard life of an Indian woman, packing up camp, erecting teepees, butchering buffalo, tanning hides, sewing, and cooking. She shared in what proved to be the beginning of the end for the Comanche, witnessing the dwindling numbers lost through war and white man’s diseases like cholera, which swept through Indian villages and killed hundreds. The buffalo herds also dwindled, affecting every aspect of Comanche life.

  Cynthia Ann bore Peta Nocona three children. A boy, called Quanah, followed by a second son, Peanuts. Later, she gave birth to a daughter named Prairie Flower. Another sighting of Cynthia Ann in 1851 made first mention of her sons. A final report came in the 1850s from explorer Captain Randolph Marcy. “There is at this time,” he wrote, “a white woman among the Middle Comanches, who, with her brother, was captured while they were young children from their father’s house…. This woman has adopted all the habits and peculiarities of the Comanches; has an Indian husband and children, and cannot be persuaded to leave them.”30

  Throughout the 1850s, Peta Nocona led brutal and bloody raids against isolated white settlements across Texas, hoping to stem the tide of invasion into Comanche country. Some raids even took him into Parker County, named for his wife’s kin.

  The Comanche had never faced such high stakes before. In the two decades since Cynthia Ann’s capture, the number of white settlers in Texas had mushroomed from 15,000 people to more than 600,000. Roads lay where none had once existed, even railroad tracks skimmed across the land. Texas had only three newspapers in 1836 to tell the tale of the Parker raid, but by 1860, 71 papers heralded the latest news. The US government meant to protect this frontier and drive the native people into submission or death in the process.

  In November 1860, a posse of men tracked Peta Nocona’s raiders deep into Comanche territory, discovering a large village that served as a staging ground for the raids. A full-scale invasion, including Texas Rangers and US soldiers, quickly organized. By the time they reached the camp on December 19, most of the village had vanished; only a few Comanche remained, loading up horses with packs of buffalo meat and preparing to leave. The posse’s commander, a 23-year old named Sul Ross, divided his men to block the Indians’ retreat and then attacked the camp.

  The 60 men surprised the Comanche, a group of only about 15, mostly women and old men, with a few warriors for protection. The fight lasted only moments as soldiers cut down horses, dogs, and Indians. Three Comanche escaped: a lone rider on one horse and two riding together on another horse. Ross, his manservant, and another soldier gave chase. Ross was about to shoot the lone Indian, whom he could now see cradled a small child. The rider pulled up the horse and either opened her shirt to show she was a woman or cried “Americano! Americano!” Whatever happened, Ross did not shoot. He ordered his lieutenant to stay with the woman and rode after the other two Indians, firing and striking the rear rider, another woman, who fell to the ground.

  The man in front of her fell too, and after a fight, the warrior was killed. Ross’s servant, a Mexican named Anton Martinez who’d lived among the Comanche as a boy, identified the dead man as Peta Nocona. The raid killed twelve Comanche and gained three captives—the woman, the little girl she held, and a boy about age nine. But the soldiers had captured several hundred horses and more than 15,000 pounds of buffalo meat—a great blow to the Comanche, who needed that food for winter.

  Ross now made a shocking discovery: the Indian woman with the child had bright blue eyes. He now recognized her as a white woman. At the sight of Peta Nocona’s body, the “white squaw” began wailing and weeping. They led her back to the village where soldiers busily looted the campsite and scalped the Indian dead.

  The woman told Martinez she had been caught after coming back to search for her boys; she feared her sons were dead. She didn’t know that Quanah, about age 12, and Peanuts had escaped safely to the village’s new location. With Martinez acting as translator, she told Ross that her father had been killed years ago in battle and she and her brother had been captured. Convinced he’d found the long-lost Cynthia Ann Parker, Ross took her to Fort Cooper, a troublesome journey as the “white squaw” constantly attempted to escape.

  Once at Fort Cooper, officials questioned her. Cynthia Ann gave a credible report of the raid on Parker’s Fort and her father’s death. The post commander’s wife took charge of cleaning up the filthy woman, who refused to give up her Comanche clothes. Meanwhile, Ross sent for Cynthia Ann’s uncle, Isaac Parker, to verify her identity.

  When Parker arrived, a desolate woman sat on a pine box with her elbows on her knees and h
er head in her hands. She ignored the room full of men until Isaac spoke her name. At that, she stood and patted her breast. “Me Cincee Ann,” she said. After that, she answered questions about the long-ago raid, remembering much of what had happened. She used a stick to draw an outline of Parker’s Fort, which Isaac claimed was a better picture than he could have made himself.

  Once more, Cynthia Ann Parker was ripped abruptly and brutally into a foreign world. She had lost her husband and her beloved boys; she felt not rescued but like a captive, shrouded in unbearable sadness. Isaac Parker headed home with Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower, along with Anton Martinez who served as an interpreter. Now cleaned up and considered presentable, the woman and child were sat on display like a carnival sideshow outside the general store in Fort Worth. A large crowd gathered to gawk. The idea that a little white girl had turned into a savage—abandoning her language and her religion, and bearing the children of a red-skinned brute—proved tantalizing stuff.

  Cynthia Ann reacted to her reentry into the white world with hostility or despair; hours passed in weeping and nursing her baby. She tried to run away, and Isaac locked her in the house when he wasn’t home. She refused to speak English and refused to give up her Comanche ways. One relative described Cynthia Ann’s means 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 insisted that she give up Indian clothes and that Prairie Flower be taught the Bible, but Cynthia Ann remained determined not to change. Isaac took his niece to Austin where he won a pension for her from the Texas legislature. The trip upset her, with everyone staring, and she believed the congressmen were debating whether she should live or die. She tried to run away but was tackled and brought back. The legislature agreed to grant her more than 4,000 acres of land and $100 a year for five years. The money would be held in a trust for her by two Parker cousins.