The Searchers Read online

  Terrified that the Indians would return, the little band traveled only at night, concealing themselves during daylight like moles hiding from the sun. On the second night, with the children crying out for food, James caught a skunk and held it under water until it drowned. “We soon had it cooked,” he wrote. It was all they had to eat for three days.

  On the fourth night they caught another skunk and two small turtles, a veritable feast. It took two more days to reach the settlement. The next day, Rachel’s husband, Luther Plummer, arrived on foot. The other survivors also straggled in, with their own harrowing tale to tell. Abram Anglin, Silas Bates, and David and Evans Faulkenberry said that as soon as they heard the alarm they had grabbed their rifles but got to the fort too late to save the victims or rescue the captives. Seeing that they were badly outnumbered, they hid in the forest until sunset, long after the invaders had ridden off. Anglin was exploring the ruined grounds when he saw what looked like an apparition wandering dazed and senseless, “dressed in white with long, white hair streaming down its back.” It was Sally Duty Parker, Elder John’s wife. Stabbed, perhaps raped, and left for dead by the warriors, she had somehow managed to yank the Comanche lance out of her shoulder.

  Anglin threw a blanket around her bare shoulders and gave her water. She led him to a hole where she had buried $125 in cash. They dug up the money, grabbed the five remaining horses, saddles, bacon, and honey from the stockade, and fled. Terrified by the prospect that at any moment the Indians might return, the four men and Mrs. Parker left behind the livestock and dogs howling for food and five corpses lying exposed. They found Lucy Parker and her two remaining children hidden nearby and began the trek to safety. Traveling only at night, they reached Fort Houston in three days.

  James was desperate to get back to Parker’s Fort as quickly as possible to pick up the trail of the captives. Officials authorized several hundred volunteers to accompany him but withdrew them almost immediately after a false report that Santa Anna’s troops were regrouping on the western frontier of the new Texas republic. “To go alone was useless, and to raise a company was impossible, as every person capable of service was already in the Texas army,” James would recall.

  With everyone focused on the Mexican threat, it took James more than a month to organize a group of fourteen men to return to the fort—far too late to pursue the raiding party. “We found the houses still standing, but the crops were entirely destroyed, the horses stolen, nearly all the cattle killed,” James would write. He gathered the bare bones of his father and two brothers and Samuel and Robert Frost: all of the flesh had already been devoured by animals. There was, of course, no sign of the captives.

  Monument to the victims of the massacre at Fort Parker Memorial Cemetery, Groesbeck, Texas.

  The dead were gone; the living, too, seemed to have vanished.

  THE INDIANS HAD RIDDEN until midnight, keen to put distance between themselves and any possible pursuers. They finally stopped in a clearing, hog-tied Rachel Plummer and Elizabeth Kellogg facedown on the ground with plaited leather straps, punching and kicking them for amusement and increasing the intensity of the blows whenever the two young women cried out. Rachel’s head wound opened up again and she struggled to keep from smothering in her own blood. When Elizabeth called out to her and she sought to respond, their captors stomped on both of them. The three children—Cynthia Ann, her brother John, and Rachel’s young son James Pratt—were tied down nearby. If they called out or cried, they, too, were punched and kicked.

  The warriors danced throughout the night, young men high on adrenaline, reenacting scenes from their glorious victory, working themselves into a frenzy and tormenting and humiliating their captives. Rape was often part of these rituals. Although Rachel was not explicit, she later wrote that her captors treated her with such barbarity she could not bear to describe the details: “It is with feelings of the deepest mortification that I think of it.”

  The next morning they were off again, passing out of the rich, forested bottomlands and threading their way through the dense wooded fabric of the Cross Timbers, then pouring out onto the flat, open countryside. They trampled swift, yielding buffalo grass and skirted the rocky outcroppings and ravines that punctuated the vast, blunt landscape.

  The raiding party rode for five days, until they finally reached the High Plains, where they stopped to divide their captives. A group of Kichais took Elizabeth, while separate bands of Comanches claimed Cynthia Ann and John. Rachel had one last tender moment with her son James Pratt. The raiders untied her and brought her the child for breast-feeding. James Pratt’s swollen body was covered in bruises and she hugged him tightly. But when the Indians saw that he had already been weaned, they pulled him out of her arms and sent him off with another small band.

  Rachel never saw him again.

  JAMES PARKER’S NEXT OBJECTIVE was to put together a company of men to journey directly to Indian Territory, north of the Red River in what is now Oklahoma, in pursuit of Rachel, Elizabeth Kellogg, and the three children. To accomplish that, he needed the blessing of the commander who was widely celebrated for defeating Santa Anna, a man whom from the beginning James mistrusted and antagonized.

  Sam Houston’s mythic life was ax-cut from the same rough block of pioneer timber as the Parkers. Born in Virginia in 1793, he had migrated at age thirteen with his widowed mother and eight siblings to the mountains of Tennessee after the death of his father. Farm life in Tennessee did not agree with young Houston; he soon ran away from home and spent three years on and off living with Cherokee Indians, who adopted him and gave him the name Colonneh—“the Raven.” Houston called Cherokee chief Oolooteka his “Indian Father,” treated the Cherokees as a surrogate family, and later helped them resettle west of the Mississippi in Indian Territory after the federal government expelled them from their tribal homeland. Along with two of Elder John Parker’s sons, he fought under Andrew Jackson’s command against the Creek Indians during the War of 1812. Jackson treated him like a protégé, and under Old Hickory’s guidance Houston completed law school, served in the U.S. House of Representatives, and was elected governor of Tennessee.

  Tall, dashing, moody, and intensely ambitious, Houston carved his own flamboyant legend as a two-fisted backwoodsman, soldier, and Indian fighter. He was a hard drinker and a brawler: he caned a fellow congressman on the streets of Georgetown after the man publicly questioned his honesty. Still, Houston looked like Old Hickory’s political heir and a surefire presidential candidate until his marriage to nineteen-year-old Eliza Allen mysteriously collapsed after only eleven weeks, and he resigned the governorship and fled Tennessee for Indian Territory. He lived there with the Cherokees in self-imposed exile for nearly three years—choosing, he wrote, to “abandon once more the habitations of civilized men, with their coldness, their treachery, and their vices, and pass years among the children of the Great Spirit.” Houston added to his own myth when he visited Washington to lobby on the behalf of the Cherokees clad in native garb: turban, leggings, breechclout, and blanket. He became that classic American frontier figure: the Man Who Knows Indians.

  Like the Parkers, Houston eventually made his way to Texas, the land of fresh beginnings, where as an experienced military man he quickly became commander of the newly declared republic’s makeshift army. After his troops vanquished Santa Anna’s forces at San Jacinto, Houston’s popularity skyrocketed and he easily defeated Stephen F. Austin to become the first president of the new nation. Not all were enamored of their charismatic new leader. “He’s eloquent, patriotic, and talented,” wrote Texas newspaper editor John Henry Brown, a contemporary, but also “jealous, envious, dissipated, wicked, artful, and overbearing.”

  Houston’s backwoods upbringing and experiences as an Indian fighter were similar to that of James Parker, but he and James had little else in common. While James was a teetotaling, sanctimonious Baptist, Houston was a proud and profane man whose bouts with alcohol were legendary. While James learned to hate I
ndians indiscriminately, Houston sympathized with many of them and celebrated his adoptive Cherokee heritage. He concluded early on that Indians, like whites, came in many varieties, some trustworthy and some not, and that it was important to be able to discern between them. In effect, the two men represented the American empire’s conflicting approaches to native peoples: the carrot versus the stick.

  During the independence war, Houston worked hard to tamp down hostilities between Texans and Indians and prevent native peoples from allying with Santa Anna and launching a second front. He showered friendly Indians with gifts and promises that Texans would not impinge on their territory. “Your enemies and ours are the same,” he wrote to a group of Comanche chiefs in December 1836. If so, it was at best a temporary state of affairs.

  Houston expressed his condolences to the Parker family for the attack on Parker’s Fort and the abduction of the five captives, but he was reluctant to help James pursue a scorched-earth campaign to get them back. He saw James as an irrational Indian hater and a one-man wrecking crew who could single-handedly demolish the good-neighbor policy Houston was working so hard to establish with native peoples.

  After tending to his sick wife and children, James went in early July to see Houston, who was himself recovering from a severe leg wound he had received at the battle of San Jacinto. Houston rejected James’s demand for a large company of soldiers to hunt down the Indians and rescue the captives, telling James a peace treaty would be a more effective means of securing their release. James argued that the Indians would never agree “until they were whipped, and well whipped,” but Houston was unmoved. “All argument failed,” wrote James, who felt that “Gen. Houston betrayed too great an indifference to the matter.”

  James was still lobbying Houston in mid-August when Elizabeth Kellogg suddenly appeared in Nacogdoches. She had been purchased for $150 by a band of friendly Delaware Indians, who proceeded to ransom her to the Texans for a similar amount—paid by Houston, according to James, who says he himself was penniless. James returned her to her family. But first there was an ugly scene when he and Elizabeth came across a wounded Indian who had been shot while allegedly trying to steal a horse. By James’s account, Elizabeth recognized the man as one of the raiders who had killed Elder John: she claimed to remember the distinctive scars on each of the man’s arms. James reacted “with mingled feelings of joy, sorrow and revenge.” He gave no details of what he did to the Indian, but afterward, “suffice it to say … it was the unanimous opinion of the company that he would never kill and scalp another white man.”

  Uncle James had killed his first Indian.

  ALL THREE OF THE PARKER CHILDREN— Cynthia Ann, John, and James Pratt—disappeared into the heart of the Comanche world and left no written account of their experiences. Rachel Plummer, by contrast, would leave a compact, detailed, and brutally frank written narrative that depicts the stunning violence of her abduction and captivity.

  After they separated her from her young son and the other captives, Rachel’s abductors headed north. Each day the vegetation receded further and the landscape grew more stark and naked, until they entered what seemed like a vast, arid sea of brown rock, dry dirt, and scrub. The imperious sun beat down, and even in May a hot breeze clawed at the ground. Washington Irving, who had passed through the same area four years earlier accompanying a government surveying mission, found “something inexpressibly lonely … [H]ere we have an immense extent of landscape without a sign of human existence. We have the consciousness of being far, far beyond the bounds of human habitation; we feel as if moving in the midst of a desert world.”

  This was the heart of Comancheria, homeland and sanctuary of the Comanche nation, an empire without borders, signposts, fences, or walls. It was a roughly egg-shaped territory stretching some six hundred miles north to south from Kansas and the headwaters of the Arkansas River to the Rio Grande, and four hundred miles east to west from modern-day Oklahoma to New Mexico. The Comanches were supreme nomads: they built nothing they could not tear down overnight, load onto a travois strapped to the backs of horses or dogs, and drag to a new location. They left no monuments, temples, or enduring architecture. Even the term “Comanche” was created by others. It was derived from the Ute Indians, who described their foes as Koh-mahts, “Those Who Are Always Against Us.” The Comanches called themselves Nemernuh—“the People”—a name that suggested that non-Comanches were less than human.

  There was in fact not one overarching Comanche nation but rather a collection of bands that spoke the same language and recognized each other as distantly related even while living in separate geographic areas. There may have been a dozen or more of these bands: among the larger and more noteworthy were the Penateka (“Honey-Eaters”), who dominated southern and central Texas; the Nokoni (“Those Who Turn Back”) in the northeast region; the Quahadi (“Antelope Eaters”) in the northwest and New Mexico, and the Yamparika (“Root Eaters”) in western Kansas and southeastern Colorado. There was no central authority, no chief whose word was law or could be considered binding on the others, no rulers and no subjects.

  Still, by the mid-eighteenth century the Comanches had become the most relentless and feared war machine in the Southwest. They butchered their prisoners—torturing, amputating, eviscerating, mutilating, decapitating, and scalping—for entertainment, for prestige as warriors, and for the belief that to destroy the body of an enemy was to doom his soul to eternal limbo. Comanche warriors practiced a ritualized form of warfare: counting coup by striking an enemy and escaping untouched was as prestigious as killing him. The battlefield was a place to make a fashion statement. A Spanish priest who watched hundreds of Comanches form outside the Franciscan mission of San Saba in central Texas in 1758 noted the Indians’ “most horrible attire.” They painted their faces red and black and dressed in animal skins, horns, tails, and feather head-dresses. But the fashion show was a prelude to a brutal slaughter: eight men at the mission were butchered, scalped, and decapitated.

  The intense brutality reflected the harsh conditions Comanches faced. Food and other resources were scarce. These were meant to be shared with kinsmen, not with others, and violence reinforced this code. The modern image of Indians—nurtured by the Native American rights movement, revisionist historians, and the film Dances With Wolves—has been one of profoundly spiritual and environmentally friendly genocide victims seeking harmony with the land and humankind. But the Comanches were nobody’s victims and no one’s friends. They were magnificent, brutal, and relentless.

  “The Comanche constitute the largest and most terrible nomadic nation anywhere in the territory of the Mexican republic,” wrote Jean-Louis Berlandier, a French-born naturalist who traveled throughout the region in the late 1820s and was captivated by the native peoples he observed. “These constantly wandering savages are incredible in their agility. The extremes of the weather and the privations of a life of constant turmoil combine to give them a physical hardiness peculiarly their own.”

  Raiding and trading were their way of life—for goods, horses, food, and captives. Imported to the new world by the Spanish conquistadores, horses proved to be a technological breakthrough that transformed Comanche life. Once they mastered the horse, the newly mobile Comanches expanded their field of operations. They quickly turned New Mexico into what the historian Pekka Hämäläinen calls “a vast hinterland of extractive raiding,” rampaged through Texas and crossed the Rio Grande into the vast, unprotected underbelly of northern Mexico. Under the decaying colonial rule of Spain, the Mexican authorities responded with wildly shifting policies, mixing retribution with appeasement, gift giving, and rewards that amounted to paying extortion. “The peace lasted only as long as the gift distributions did,” writes Hämäläinen. With the outbreak of a revolt against Spain in 1810, the gift giving dried up—and the raiding resumed.

  Rachel Plummer never said which band of Comanches she was held by—perhaps she never knew—but she and her captors were constantly on the move,
never stopping for more than three or four days at a time except when the weather grew too raw for travel. They roamed from the stark alkaline flats of the Llano Estacado—the “Staked Plains”—in West Texas and New Mexico, north to the southeastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, covered in snow even in July. Rachel, barefoot and lightly clothed, suffered terribly from the cold. She was enslaved to a small family consisting of a man, woman, and daughter, and her duties were to mind the horses, dress the buffalo skins, and perform other menial tasks. The two women beat her frequently.

  She became an involuntary traveler through a world of primitive wonder. In her narrative she describes endless miles of salt plains, mirages of vast lakes, stunning mountains, and a wide range of animals, from elk, antelope, bears, wild mustangs, and wolves, to rumors of a man-tiger who looked like a human being, only taller, with huge paws and long claws instead of hands. The riverbanks were populated with turtles, deer, coyote, cattle ducks, geese, and slender gray cranes. The stars were as intense as candles, the moon so large it stretched across the night sky. “Its light turned the evening mist to a color like pearl,” Texas native son Larry McMurtry would later write.

  Rachel was four months pregnant when she was captured, and in October she gave birth to a baby boy. She pleaded with her older mistress to help her care for and protect the infant, but to no avail. At first the warriors left mother and baby alone. But as the child demanded more and more of her time, Rachel’s work suffered. One cold morning when he was around six weeks old, a half dozen men surrounded her as she was breast-feeding him. While several of the men held her down, one took the baby by the throat and held tight until the infant turned blue and lost consciousness. Then the others took turns throwing him in the air and letting him fall on the hard ground. They handed the lifeless body back to Rachel, but when the baby began to breathe again they grabbed him one more time, tied a rope around his neck, and dragged the corpse for several hundred yards. “My little innocent was not only dead, but literally torn in pieces,” Rachel would write in her narrative.