The Searchers Read online

  By 1860 Isaac was the only Parker of his generation still capable of undertaking the journey to determine whether the captive woman at Camp Cooper was Cynthia Ann. Lucy Duty Parker, Cynthia Ann’s mother, had died in 1852 without knowing her oldest child’s fate. Uncle James, who had devoted most of a decade to an obsessive search for the abducted children, was sixty-three years old and in ill health, remarried after the death of his first wife, Martha, and living three hundred miles to the southeast in Houston County. And so Isaac Parker set off by himself in a two-horse buggy for Camp Cooper. He rode forty-five miles west to the frontier town of Weatherford, where he obtained a letter of introduction from John Baylor, the former Indian agent who was editor of the White Man, and some clothing for Cynthia Ann, from his niece Nancy Parker. “Make them plenty big, Nancy,” he told her. “The Parker people are big people.” Then he and a neighbor of Nancy’s rode another ninety miles to Camp Cooper, arriving in mid-January. Isaac met first with Evans and Jones and then was taken to see the prisoner.

  Isaac Parker, Cynthia Ann’s uncle, who traveled to Fort Cooper in January 1861 to claim her and her daughter and return them to her Texas family.

  Isaac Parker’s cabin near Birdville, Texas, outside Fort Worth, where Cynthia Ann and her daughter, Prairie Flower, lived in 1861 after she was returned to her Texas family. The photo was taken in 1925 before the cabin was dismantled and relocated to the Amon Carter Ranch. It has since been moved again to the Log Cabin Village in Fort Worth.

  She was stout and powerfully built. Her hair was dark and stringy, her skin callused. Her expression was edgy, like a deer caught in the harsh glare of a soldier’s torch. Isaac asked a series of questions designed to test her memories of her childhood.

  “She sat for a time immovable, lost in profound meditation, oblivious to every thing by which she was surrounded, ever and anon convulsed as it were by some powerful emotion which she struggled to suppress,” stated one newspaper report of the meeting. “After the lapse of a few moments, she was enabled in her beautiful language of intelligible signs and Comanche tongue, with a peculiarly sweet English accent, to give the following narrative.” She claimed to remember the fence around Old Fort Parker, drinking milk fresh from the stockade’s cows, the Indians raiders carrying the white flag, and the ensuing slaughter.

  “When Col. Parker requested the interpreter to ask her if she recollected her name,” wrote one reporter, “she arose before the question could be asked by him, and striking herself on the breast exclaimed, ‘Me Cynthia Ann.’ “

  THE WITNESS ACCOUNTS of her first meeting with Uncle Isaac portray Cynthia Ann as an indoctrinated savage desperately trying to break through the psychic chains of her long captivity to return to her natural civilized state. In the eyes of white observers it was as if the Comanches had stolen her soul, which she now struggled to reclaim. The ties that bound her emotionally and culturally to her Comanche family and to the wider Comanche world were invisible to them and made no sense. They knew neither psychology nor anthropology and possessed no intellectual or scientific tools to help them understand who she was, what she had become, or what she wanted. Most of all, they could not see that—despite her baptism and her early Christian upbringing—she was for all intents and purposes a Comanche, violently thrust, like a kidnapped time traveler, from one world into another.

  Isaac sought to embrace her, but she began to weep. She said she did not wish to go home with him; she wanted either to stay at Fort Cooper until she got some word about her two sons, Quanah and Pecos, or else to return to her people—meaning, of course, the Comanches. But Isaac gave her no choice. First, however, she pleaded with Horace Jones to keep watch for her boys. If they were captured, she begged him, please protect them from harm and send them to her.

  All the goods captured by individual Rangers and cavalrymen at the Pease River had been sold off, and Isaac had to buy back Cynthia Ann’s pony and saddle for the long ride to Birdville. It took them several days to make the gray winter journey. Each night, when they would camp, the toddler would gather sticks and anything else she could find to put on the fire. “She was the smartest child of her age I ever saw,” recalled Isaac’s son, I. D. Parker. They finally arrived in Birdville on January 26.

  The modest log ranch house built by Isaac in the late 1840s consisted of two separate cabins connected by a breezeway. For Cynthia Ann, who was used to sleeping under the stars or in a teepee, the crowded little room in which she was confined at night must have felt like a prison cell. The unfamiliar white women’s clothing, the strange food, and the stares of outsiders could only have added to the sense that she had fallen into enemy hands. To her relatives, she seemed like an exotic wild animal, and they viewed her with pity, fascination, and revulsion. She had grown up among the heathens, had become one herself, had even had intercourse with one, and had given birth to three little savages. She had brazenly crossed a forbidden boundary.

  Rather than concede the reality that she preferred her Indian family to her white relatives, newspaper stories claimed she had been whipped and tortured into compliance by the Comanches. Her arms and body “bear the marks of having been cruelly treated,” reported the Clarksville Northern Standard. Her supposed torments were given sexual context. Her “long night of suffering and woe could furnish the material for a tale more interesting than those found in the Arabian Nights Entertainment,” opined the Dallas Herald.

  She quickly became a local attraction. “When they got here and the news spread, the people came from near and far for a week or more,” recalled I. D. Parker. “When she would see a crowd coming she would run to my wife and cling to her and sometimes crawl under the bed as she believed she would be killed.”

  One interpreter whom the Parkers engaged to communicate with her carefully explained to her that Isaac was her uncle. “After this interview she was more cheerful but said that the Comanches would come down here and kill all the people the next Sunday morning,” wrote I. D. Parker.

  Medora Robinson Turner, a Fort Worth schoolgirl, recalled being let out of class one day and taken to a retail store, where a crowd had gathered to gawk at the celebrity captive. “She looked like a squaw,” Turner recalled. “She stood on a large wooden box surrounded by the curious spectators. She was bound with rope. She wore a torn calico dress. She made a pathetic figure. Tears were streaming down her face, and she was muttering in the Indian language.”

  Isaac’s wife, Lucy, the matron of the house, oversaw all the domestic work of the farm—tending the hens, milking, butter making, weaving, and sewing—and had little time for Cynthia Ann. Instead, Lucy turned her niece over to an elderly African-American house servant. “I was told of the many futile efforts to teach her, and how she would wander away every chance she got and stay till hunted and brought back,” wrote Susan Parker St. John, a cousin who later interviewed relatives about Cynthia Ann.

  The Parkers were torn by conflicting impulses. On the one hand, they wanted to be as helpful as possible to a relative who had undergone a horrific trauma. “As savage-like and dark of complexion as she was, Cynthia Ann was still dear to her overjoyed uncle, and was welcomed home by relatives with all the joyous transports with which the prodigal son was hailed upon his miserable return to the parental roof,” wrote Joseph and Araminta Taulman, two other cousins. But her relatives were bewildered by her own bewilderment and uncertain as to why their long-lost cousin was so fearful and expressed no gratitude for being rescued from heathens and restored to the bosom of good Baptists.

  In the original captivity narratives, the white woman captive stood for the values of Christianity and civilization by resisting the threats and depredations of her godless savage captors. In doing so she demonstrated not only her own moral character but also the enduring strength of her Christian faith. Indeed she often sacrificed herself for those values. But the meaning of Cynthia Ann’s story was far different. Her identification with the Comanches and their way of life and her desperate longing to return to them w
ere a rebuke to civilization and to her own family. She had effectively reversed the narrative and subverted its meaning: instead of being abducted by Comanches, Cynthia Ann felt abducted by her white family. She was, in the deepest sense, a prisoner of war. The Parkers, as good Baptists, believed in the power of redemption. But what about someone who refused to be redeemed?

  There was a sizable amount of fear, resentment, and suspicion attached to the newly liberated cousin. What deeds of cruelty had she seen? For that matter, what crimes had she herself participated in? The Parkers were well aware of the stories of Indian women who had joined with their menfolk in torturing and dismembering white captives. “Theirs must have been a hard and unsatisfactory life,” Joseph and Araminta Taulman would write of Cynthia Ann and her captive brother, John. “The Comanches are veritable Ishmaelites, their hands being raised against all men, and every man’s hand against them … Did they flaunt the blood-dabbled scalps of helpless whites in fiendish glee—and assist at the cruel torture of the unfortunate prisoners that fell into their hands? Alas! Forgetful of their race and tongue, they were thorough savages and acted in all particulars just as their Indian comrades did.”

  Captivity was a fate “worse than death,” the Taulmans concluded, unaware of the irony of their words.

  One Sunday morning, I. D. Parker recalled, Cynthia Ann went out in the yard with Prairie Flower, gathered wood chips, and kindled a fire. “When the fire was started she kneeled down by it, held up her hands and then bring them down saying some sort of ceremony then rise up and lean over the fire and cut her breast and let the blood drop in the fire muttering something all the time … She looked as solemn as death.”

  I. D. Parker made one more curious observation. “Somebody is mistaken about Nocona being her husband,” he would write in a letter many years later. “We asked her husband’s name and she gave a name I don’t remember what it was, but it was not Nocona … We asked her if he was a chief, she said he was a little chief.”

  The suggestion here is intriguing. One of the key elements in the Cynthia Ann Parker legend is the claim that she married her abductor, a powerful war chief who fathered her three children. Her surviving son, Quanah, certainly thought so. But I. D. Parker was suggesting it was not true.

  Seeking restitution for Cynthia Ann and the child, Uncle Isaac took her in March 1861 to the secessionist convention of the Texas legislature in Austin, where lawmakers were debating whether to leave the Union and join the newly formed Confederacy. During a break in the deliberations, the legislators voted to grant Cynthia Ann a league of land and a $100 annual stipend for Prairie Flower’s education. Some of the ladies of Austin “dressed her neatly” and escorted her to the gallery. But as she sat overlooking the legislators with her uncle and aunt, she became convinced she was watching her own trial and that the curious white men staring up at her from the floor of the chamber below were sitting in judgment. Terrified, she bolted for the door, clutching Prairie Flower in her arms, and had to be coaxed back to the gallery by her uncle.

  SOON AFTER HER RELATIVES ESCORTED her back to Birdville, Cynthia Ann Parker vanished from newspapers and other reports. Her celebrity status rapidly faded as it became clear that she was an ungrateful and unrepentant Comanche. The mythmakers disguised as historians for the most part took over—James DeShields being the first and foremost. They offered up for public consumption what became the official account of her captivity and rescue, and they insisted that she had been damaged and her soul destroyed by the Comanches.

  But some of Cynthia Ann’s relatives, curious to find out what actually had happened to her, did their own, less formal but more reliable research, producing a more nuanced version of her life and her fate. It is no accident that most of these researchers were women. Few of their accounts were ever published: their versions did not seem to fit the prevailing bombastic standards of Texas history. Their unannotated, mostly handwritten notes are scattered throughout boxes of archives at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. Some of these appear here for the first time.

  Araminta Taulman, working in the 1920s, documented through interviews the circumstances behind the iconic photo of Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower taken at A. F. Corning’s photographic studio in Fort Worth a few weeks after their return from Austin. A customer named Mollie Allen was at the studio that day: her family in Kentucky had been begging her for a likeness, fearful that they would never get to see her once civil war broke out. Sixty years later, Mollie, long-married and known as Mrs. R. H. King, would recall to Araminta that the strange-looking woman had seemed deeply afraid that morning, had held her small daughter tightly, and would not let her go. Cynthia Ann, she recalled, was of “medium height and heavy build, and seemed very strong physically.”

  “Her hands were large and muscular apparently from the hard life she had led for nearly a quarter of a century with the Indians … Her skin was rough and her features coarse from hardships,” but she “looked as though she had been a pretty girl in her youth.” Mollie King added that Cynthia Ann had a “look of sadness in her large expressive soft-blue eyes, and despite her obvious fear, seemed to present a kindly appearance. The child, perhaps sensing her mother’s anxiety, seemed wild and frightened.”

  Mollie and a companion, Virginia Turnbill, tried to allay Cynthia Ann’s fears. But when Corning “pointed the camera at her she threw her hands before her face and moaned a deep oo-oo-oo.” It was clear she feared that she would be killed or her spirit would be harmed by the cold glass eye of the camera. “She was very much afraid in the studio as she did not know what was about to happen to her.”

  When Corning showed her some of the pictures of Mollie and Virginia, Cynthia Ann seemed to relax. She took a seat before the camera but refused to let go of Prairie Flower. Corning had to take the shot with the little girl in her arms. To calm the child, Cynthia Ann opened her plain calico dress and began to nurse her. Cynthia Ann’s skin was as “white as snow,” Mollie said.

  The small studio filled with “curious people who had come to see the white captive, and the photographer had a difficult time making a successful picture on account of the crowd and the excitement they caused Cynthia Ann,” recalled Virginia Turnbill.

  In the photograph that has survived from that day, Cynthia Ann’s expression is hard and raw as granite. Her face is flat, weathered, and heavyset. Her lips are sealed shut. Her dark hair has been hacked short in the manner of a Comanche in mourning. She is wearing a thin bandanna around her neck and a borrowed muslin dress unbuttoned where her raven-haired little girl suckles at her right breast. There is no comprehension; at best, there is resignation, and lurking behind it a palpable sense of fear.

  This portrait is based on the famous photograph of Cynthia Ann Parker and daughter Prairie Flower taken in February 1861 at the A. F. Corning Studio in Fort Worth.

  CYNTHIA ANN’S WELL-MEANING but puzzled relatives insisted upon instructing her with Bible lessons and homilies and praying with her. All of these rituals were disturbing to her. Even food was a source of tension. Cynthia Ann and her daughter could not adjust to the standard Texan fare of pork, bread, potatoes, and vegetables. Then one day their relatives slaughtered a cow, and the two raced to the carcass with squeals of delight. “As soon as the beef was opened she took out the kidneys and liver and they commenced eating and dancing and yelling in real savage style, the blood running down their faces and the smoke from the warm liver rising as they ate,” I. D. Parker recalled. “It seemed to be the first meal they had relished.”

  Uncle Isaac never came to terms with his untamed niece. It was reported that he locked her and Prairie Flower inside their room each night to prevent them from escaping. The Parkers denied these reports. “All the bosh advertised in the papers and histories about her trying to escape was without foundation,” wrote I. D. Parker. “She was never confined, said she did not want to be with her husband as he whipped too much, but wanted her boys.”

  Stil
l, it was clear that Isaac and his wife were too old to cope with a Comanche woman and her wild young daughter. At Isaac’s behest, his son William and William’s wife, Mattie, agreed to take Cynthia Ann into their home two miles down the road. Mattie had a nine-month-old boy and helped induce Cynthia Ann to hop into their two-seat spring wagon for the trip home by handing her the baby and taking Prairie Flower in Mattie’s own arms.

  Susan Parker St. John, wife of a onetime governor of Kansas and a first cousin of Cynthia Ann, traveled to Texas in the 1880s and interviewed surviving members of the Parker family about their Comanche cousin, with an eye toward writing a family history. She interviewed William and Mattie, among others, and took handwritten notes that offer our most reliable and poignant account of Cynthia Ann’s life with her Texas family after her recapture.

  That first night, Mattie took Cynthia Ann into a room with two beds, washed her baby, and put on his nightie, and then did the same with Prairie Flower. Mattie then undressed herself and put on a dressing gown, and after much coaxing induced Cynthia Ann to put on a similar gown and lie down with her toddler. “Mattie smoothed back the tangled hair from her forehead and breathing a prayer kissed her,” wrote Susan Parker St. John. “This was surely the first kiss she had ever known of a white woman. Cynthia Ann looked astonished but not displeased.” In the morning, Mattie awoke to find Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower sleeping inside their dirty old buffalo robe on the floor behind the door. It was the robe they had been captured in. “It took many trials before she would undress and sleep on the bed.”

  Prairie Flower “was dark with black bright eyes and thick black straight hair. In movement [she] was quick as a flash, would run like a quail, catch the little chickens, and loving it, squeeze it to death, every time she got a chance. She did not care for the screeching old hen flying at and scratching her. She never cried.”