The Searchers Read online

  The girl gradually learned to speak English, and Cynthia Ann started to speak some as well. Still, “many times the ‘call of the wild’ came to her, especially in the fall of the year, when she had days of melancholy and would sit for hours and look up at the sky. She would go a little way from the house, make a circle about six feet across, put bark and grass in it, set it on fire, and sit looking through the smoke to the sun.”

  She was, Susan Parker St. John surmised, looking for the spirits of the dead.

  Coho Smith was a former Indian scout who spoke fluent Comanche after spending several months as a Comanche captive in 1848. He was summoned to Birdville by William Parker and arrived one evening near dinnertime. At first Cynthia Ann treated him as if he was just one more curious gawker. But all that changed at the dinner table after Smith said the first Comanche words that occurred to him. When Cynthia Ann discovered he could speak her language, Smith later recalled, “she sprang up with a scream and knocked about half the dishes off the table … She was so excited I really thought she would go into a fit.”

  The Parkers placed Smith in a chair next to their frantic cousin and she held him by one arm all through dinner while jabbering constantly in Comanche and Spanish. She begged him to take her back to Comancheria. “My heart is crying all the time for my two sons,” she told him.

  He told her he had just gotten married and couldn’t leave his young wife behind. Cynthia Ann said her people would give him beautiful women to replace his wife, along with horses and anything else he wanted. “My people will be so glad if you bring me to them they will give you anything I would ask of them.”

  She kept Smith up much of the night, pleading with him to agree to help her escape. Part of her frenzy must have stemmed from the opportunity at last to speak in her native Comanche tongue to someone who could understand her. And part was a desperate attempt to find a way back to the place she called home and to the children she considered her one true family. Smith reiterated that he couldn’t help her: there were two wars raging, the war between the Union and the Confederacy as well as the conflict between Comanches and Texans. Smith said he was sure that if he attempted to take her north he’d be killed either by Comanches or by his fellow Texans once they learned what he had done. He left the next day without saying good-bye, and he did not visit again.

  IN THE SPRING OF 1862, Cynthia Ann’s brother Silas and her brother-in-law J. R. O’Quinn came to Birdville to take her to live at Silas’s home some 115 miles away in Van Zandt County in East Texas. It took several days to persuade her to go: she seemed especially reluctant to leave Mattie and her baby boy and agreed only after Mattie promised to come visit soon. She never did.

  The Civil War was draining the Texas economy at the same time it was extracting tens of thousands of young men to serve as soldiers. After Silas was drafted into the Confederate army in late 1862, Cynthia Ann was forced to move again, this time to the home of her sister Orlena, who was married to J. R. O’Quinn, at nearby Slater’s Creek. T. J. Cates, a neighbor who visited with her, remembered Cynthia Ann as stout and hardworking. “She had a wild expression and would look down when people looked at her,” he recalled. “She was an expert in tanning hides with the hair on them, or plaiting or knitting either ropes or whips.” But despite her expertise, Cynthia Ann remained a restless, troubled soul—a mother of missing children. “She thought her two boys were lost on the prairie … This dissatisfied her very much.”

  Van Zandt County was a sparsely settled farm area far removed from the state’s major population centers. After smallpox all but wiped out its Caddo Indian inhabitants, the eastern portion of the county was occupied by Cherokees, who signed peace treaties first with Mexico and later with Texas starting in 1836. But the treaty proved no protection from hard-line governor Mirabeau B. Lamar’s expulsion campaign a few years later when his troops burned out and expelled thousands of Indians from East Texas. Their forced departure opened the area for white settlement. When Silas and J. R. returned from the war, Silas moved away with his family, seeking better economic opportunities. Cynthia Ann refused to go with them, and remained at Orlena’s with Prairie Flower, her cow, chickens, and a sow with six piglets. Cynthia Ann’s tanning skills—honed on the prairie—helped provide a decent income. Prairie Flower attended school and learned to read and write in English. “She was a happy, care free child, her mother’s pride and blessing,” wrote Susan St. John.

  By now, the famous white Comanche was no longer news; no crowds journeyed to far-off Van Zandt County to jostle for a glimpse. Cynthia Ann’s own family members seemed to lose interest as well. Whatever promises they might have made to take her to Comancheria to help find her boys once the Civil War had ended seem to have long been forgotten. As for James Parker, the obsessed uncle who had spent a decade seeking to track down the young people abducted in 1836, there is no record that he ever sought to visit his long-lost niece before his death in Houston County in late 1863. He was buried near his brother Daniel in the Pilgrim Cemetery in Elkhart.

  Like so many parts of Cynthia Ann’s story, Prairie Flower’s death is shrouded in myth and ambiguity. James DeShields in his published history in 1886 claims she died of smallpox, influenza, or one of the other diseases that rampaged across the East Texas countryside sometime in 1863, and a brokenhearted Cynthia Ann—her will to live crushed by her daughter’s death—followed within a few months. No one bothered to record the death or write an obituary. In a slight variation of the story, I. D. Parker—Isaac’s son and Cynthia Ann’s first cousin—who was away fighting in the Civil War from early 1864 until the end of the conflict, claimed that mother and daughter both died in the spring of 1865.

  Another legend has it that the Parkers, realizing that a half-breed Indian girl would never find acceptance in the white world, faked the story of Prairie Flower’s death, changed her name, and sent her off to be raised in New Orleans. She purportedly married a Spanish sea captain in Houston, moved with him to New Mexico, and raised a family there. A New Mexico woman wrote the Dallas Historical Society in the 1950s saying she had talked to an old man in Las Cruces who claimed to be the son of Prairie Flower. The man said his mother had been killed in an Indian raid, although such attacks would have ceased long before she reached adulthood. Every now and then, someone would emerge and claim to be a grandchild or a distant relative. But no one ever provided proof of the claim.

  In fact, the few eyewitness accounts put the date of Cynthia Ann’s death as far later, and the only known document from the period supports them. An 1870 census for Anderson County lists Cynthia Ann Parker as a member of the O’Quinn household. It lists her birth year as “abt 1825” and her age as forty-five. J. M. Emerson, a resident of nearby Anderson County who talked to Silas Parker and J. R. O’Quinn many years later, put the year of Prairie Flower’s death as 1868, and said Cynthia Ann moved with the O’Quinns to Anderson County and worked in their sawmill. Susan Parker St. John, our most reliable and conscientious contemporary reporter, wrote that Prairie Flower died of brain fever at age nine and was buried in the Fosterville cemetery.

  What is clear is that with the death of her darling daughter, Cynthia Ann’s own health—physical and spiritual—began to deteriorate. She slashed her arms and breasts with a knife, part of the intense Comanche way of mourning. Her family claimed she turned to Christianity. “Cynthia Ann had united with the Methodist church and insisted on being immersed for baptism,” contends Susan St. John, who adds that Cynthia Ann lived for two years after Prairie Flower’s death and died in March 1871 at Orlena’s house. She, too, was buried in the Fosterville cemetery “beside her darling.”

  What’s striking is that after all the accounts of her recapture, and the celebrity status that produced big crowds on the streets of Fort Worth and a guest appearance before the Texas legislature, Cynthia Ann and her story fell off the face of the earth. There are no newspaper accounts of her later days, no obituary for her or Prairie Flower, and no reliable way to know exactly when
or how she died.

  Long afterward, newspapers sought to put the best light on the tragic circumstances of Cynthia Ann’s life. “A Romance of the Border” was the headline in the San Francisco Bulletin. “Story Is Romantic: Woman Who Liked Indian Life Has Large Place in History,” declared the Lawton (OK) Chronicle. The Dallas News labeled her the “most romantic of Texas heroines.” The Winkler County News called her a “Symbol of Loyalty and Love of Liberty.”

  A century later, Texas Monthly magazine cast Cynthia Ann as a proto-feminist role model. “Strong as buffalo hide, family-loving and high-spirited despite dire circumstances, Cynthia Ann demonstrated the same qualities that have ennobled iconic Texans from Mary Maverick to Barbara Jordan, Ima Hogg to Lady Bird Johnson,” a 2003 article declared. “Maybe the reason we can’t let go of Cynthia Ann is because she was the original tough Texas woman.”

  The truth was less triumphalist and more poignant. Cynthia Ann was not the hardy survivor but rather the ultimate victim of the Texan-Comanche wars, abducted and traumatized by both sides. When she was nine years old, she watched as her father, grandfather, uncle, and family friends were slaughtered before her eyes, and she was ripped from her home by brutal strangers speaking in a foreign tongue who seemed bent on killing her as well. Twenty-four years later, she underwent a similarly horrifying experience at the hands of the U.S. Cavalry and Texas Rangers. The wide gulf of misunderstanding between her and her white relatives was an eerie reflection of the gaping cultural and psychological divide between Comanches and Texans, replayed in one divided family. The fact that she had become the willing partner of a Comanche warrior who had likely been involved in slaughtering her own father, uncle, and grandfather only made her more puzzling and burdensome to her own white family.

  Even the patriarch who had returned her to the white world eventually recognized the terrible mistake he had made. In a series of conversations with a young friend, Isaac Parker called Cynthia Ann “the most unhappy person [he] ever saw. She pined for her children and her husband continuously … She was as much an Indian as if she had been born one. She knew no other people except as enemies.”

  Isaac said he had hoped “she would eventually become civilized and her love for her kin return to her, and that she would after a time forget the Indians and be glad to live among her own people.” He became tearful at times when he discussed her pain. “She was virtually a prisoner among her own loving kindred, but they did not realize it until too late.” Had she been allowed to return to her Comanche home, Isaac said, “she would probably have lived to be an old woman.”

  The story of Cynthia Ann Parker is partly a story of mothers who lose their children and die without ever knowing the fate of those children. Lucy Duty Parker, Cynthia Ann’s mother, died not knowing whether her daughter was safe. Rachel Plummer never learned what happened to her young son James Pratt after her captors pulled him from her grasp. And Cynthia Ann never again saw her two Comanche sons after she and her daughter were captured by soldiers.

  Still, if there was one saving grace in the tragedy of Cynthia Ann’s final years, it was something she herself never knew about. Only one of her children survived, but he became a heroic figure who helped save the Comanche nation, her adopted people, from destruction.

  II

  Quanah

  6.

  The Warrior (Comancheria, 1865–1871)

  Cynthia Ann Parker died believing that all her children were dead as well. But one of her sons survived. His name was Quanah Parker, and he became the next chapter in the Parker legend and the next great storyteller as well. Like the others, he told his mother’s story in large part to explain his own.

  We know little about his life and times as a son and warrior. Comanches had no written language, and after his surrender in 1875 Quanah had good reasons not to discuss his career as an enemy combatant against the forces of the United States and the sovereign state of Texas. Instead, historians have been left to sort through scraps of information, liberally embroidered with myth and outright falsehood. Quanah emerges in many accounts as the most powerful and skilled of Comanche war chiefs. In some versions, he wreaks vengeance on whites for his white mother’s recapture; in others he instructs his followers not to kill white women and children for fear of harming her and his sister, Prairie Flower.

  What we know comes from his own carefully selective memory and those of his companions and his foes, all of it recorded long after the events took place. Some of it seems plausible, most of it not. But the portrait of the early Quanah as a well-known and much-feared Comanche war chief is myth: as far as Texans were concerned, he was neither. The indisputable fact is that before 1875 there is no mention of Quanah in any official document or Indian agency record.

  One thing he was always clear about: his father, Peta Nocona, was not killed at the Pease River Massacre. According to the most plausible Comanche accounts, Nocona and his two sons were on a hunting trip on the morning of the attack, too far from the besieged encampment to hear or see what was happening—hence Cynthia Ann’s extreme anxiety over the fate of her boys after she was captured by the troopers. Nocona heard nothing until a friend tracked him down with the terrible news.

  Nocona and his sons made their way to a large Comanche winter encampment. He must have feared the Rangers would come seeking the boys, for he changed both their names to help conceal them. According to one Comanche account, Tseeta, meaning “Eagle,” became Quanah, meaning “Sweet Smell,” and Pecos became Pee-nah, or “Peanut.”

  For the first time, Nocona explained to them that their mother was a white woman whom he had captured when she was a girl during a battle in Texas. Quanah said his father became “very morose and unhappy” over the loss of Cynthia Ann and a second wife, a Mexican captive, and “shed many tears.”

  According to Quanah, his father lived for some five more years. Comanche oral tradition says he died of old war wounds somewhere in the Antelope Hills of Oklahoma.

  Quanah would remember the times that followed his father’s death as a painful period in which he and his brother, two orphans with no close relatives, had to scrounge for food and clothing with little support from other Comanches. He attributed some of this hardship to the fact that his mother was white. Within a few years his brother died as well from one of the many epidemics that were ravaging the tribe. Quanah was truly on his own.

  He was not exactly an outcast but neither was he a cherished member of the tribe. His father had been well respected among Comanches, even legendary, for his prowess as a warrior, but was called “the Wanderer” and was known as a loner with no close friends. The young Quanah, too, traveled alone.

  The Staked Plains became his domain. The plains were a parched, brittle, limestone plateau on the western flank of Texas, some 250 miles long and 150 miles wide—as large as Maine. In summer they locked themselves inside a suffocating closet of gray haze—brown, yellow ground with shrubs and dwarfed trees sprinkled throughout like random afterthoughts before the curled blue edges of the hazy horizon. It was a land of high temperatures and low rainfall. Francisco Coronado, who had passed through the area in 1541 on his search for El Dorado, pronounced the plains “so vast that I did not find their limit anywhere I went … with no more landmarks than if we had been swallowed up by the sea.”

  The Spanish called them Llano Estacada—the “Stockade Plains”—a reference either to the fortresslike appearance of their blunt escarpments or to the stakes that one Spanish expedition hammered into the ground so that they could retrace their path through the vast swath of nothingness. On some Texan maps the plains were labeled the Great American Desert, and they might as well have been posted with a skull and cross-bones. There was precious little grass and even less water—nothing to keep a horse or a mule or a man alive for very long. Under a canopy of sullen gray sky, the plains were a theater of death. “The land is too much, too empty, claustrophobic in its immensity,” wrote the author Timothy Egan.

  To the casual observer, the L
lano looks like one seamless, arid platform. But Quanah and his fellow Comanches knew that the plains concealed a network of deeply etched canyons like intimate secrets that provided shelter from the winter storms and fragile vegetation and water throughout the rest of the year. The largest is called Palo Duro—“Hard Pole”—a name said to originate in the hardwood wild cherry and plum trees scattered through the hidden valley. At the time of the Civil War no white man had ventured into the area for three hundred years.

  Quanah knew intimately the Palo Duro and all of the small depressions, fissures, and hidden seasonal water holes of the Llano. For him each was a haven, a place he could linger and hide without challenge from red men or white. At times he even claimed to have been born on Cedar Lake, the alkaline sea on the eastern edge of the Llano. To an orphan like Quanah, something about the harsh empty desert must have felt like home.

  A YOUNG COMANCHE MALE without standing or a patron faced a hard road in attaining stature, prosperity, and a desirable bride. Those fettered by poverty or low rank faced two choices: go along with subordination for an extended period until they could gain a foothold; or strike out on their own. Quanah chose the latter.

  From his earliest days, according to oral legend, he showed an untamed romantic streak that violated the norms of Comanche society. After Peta Nocona’s death, it was said, a senior chief named Yellow Bear invited Quanah to join his camp. There Quanah fell in love with Yellow Bear’s daughter, Weckeah. Quanah knew that a fellow brave named Tannap had first call on Weckeah: Yellow Bear had already made arrangements with Tannap’s father, who had offered a string of ponies as a bride price. Yellow Bear pledged that in three nights Weckeah would join Tannap in his teepee to consummate the marriage.