The Searchers Read online

  She took comfort in believing the child had gone to heaven. And she noticed a curious thing: even as she watched her son being murdered before her eyes, her tears ceased to flow; all she could manage were deep, dry sighs.

  Rachel Plummer decided she was ready to die; indeed, so far as she was concerned, she was dead already.

  ALTHOUGH SHE COULD NOT KNOW it at the time, Rachel’s written account of her ordeal would become part of a long-standing American tradition. The captivity narrative was the country’s first indigenous literary genre.

  The first published account, Mary Rowlandson’s 1682 narrative of the abduction of herself and her three children by Narragansett Indians from the Massachusetts village of Lancaster, became America’s first homegrown bestseller. Rowlandson set the pattern. The early stories were both harrowing and redemptive. White women and their children were seized as spoils of war by dark-skinned savages who slaughtered their menfolk and pillaged their homes. The captives were spirited off to the untamed wilderness, where they faced a series of ordeals that tested their Christian faith. Usually they resisted barbaric depravity and eventually won their freedom and safe return to their families and communities. The Indians in these sagas served, in the words of cultural historian Richard Slotkin, as “the special demonic personification of the American wilderness.”

  The narratives reflected the intimate nature of the struggle between settlers and native peoples on the shores of the new world. Women and children were not merely collateral damage but primary targets, not prisoners of war but the spoils. Hundreds of white settlers were taken during captive by Indians during the colonial wars. Their stories of life among the natives fascinated, frightened, and repelled their fellow settlers.

  There was an undercurrent of anxiety and ambiguity in the captivity narratives that was all about sex. Indian men were portrayed as the most hideous of creatures—dark, unclean, untamed, and rapacious—and to be raped by an Indian was a Fate Worse than Death. Faced with this horrific possibility, Mary Rowlandson writes that she had promised to kill herself rather than be abducted. When the time came, however, she could not go through with it. “Their glittering weapons so daunted my spirit that I chose rather to go along with those ravenous bears than that moment to end my days,” she writes.

  Rowlandson claims she was lucky: no one tried to rape her during her months of captivity. But few captives returned from their time with Indians unscathed either physically or emotionally. Fewer still were reabsorbed into white society without trauma—many died within the first year or two of their return to white civilization—and some of the children resisted returning at all. Mary Rowlandson’s daughter married one of her captors and chose to remain with the Indians.

  From Mary Rowlandson through the next century, true tales of Indian captivity dominated American bookshelves. But it was the novels of James Fenimore Cooper in the early nineteenth century that most openly focused upon the sexual obsession underlying the captivity narrative. In The Last of the Mohicans (1826), two beauteous sisters, Cora and Alice, are abducted by Huron Indians led by the treacherous chief Magua. He offers to release Alice, provided that Cora, the older sister, agrees to become his wife. Cora is a ravishing beauty—“the tresses of this lady were shining and black, like the plumage of the raven. Her complexion … appeared charged with the color of the rich blood that seemed ready to burst its bounds.” She is deeply revolted by the horrifying prospect of having sex with Magua, no more so than when he stares at her with a lust so fierce “that her eyes sank with shame, under an impression that for the first time they had encountered an expression that no chaste female might endure.” But Cora does not surrender. She tells Magua that she would rather die than become his wife.

  At the time of the massacre at Parker’s Fort, three of the nation’s four biggest sellers were novels by Cooper—The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer, all of which featured captivity as an important plot element. The fourth was Everett Seaver’s A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, the story of a young woman who was captured and absorbed into the Seneca Indian tribe in western New York. When her first Indian husband died, Jemison married another, had seven children and stayed with her adoptive tribe rather than return to white civilization. These books offered a more nuanced version than their literary forerunners of life with native peoples, who were no longer depicted as purely evil. But anxiety about the spiritual and physical pollution of sex with Indians remained a constant, if unspoken, theme in the conquest of the West.

  WALLOWING IN SELF-JUSTIFICATION and hungry for vindication, James Parker left his own narrative of his search for the captives, fittingly titled Perilous Adventures, Miraculous Escapes and Sufferings of the Rev. James W. Parker. It is a ninety-page report of his trials and tribulations, packed with braggadocio and self-pity. But his account of his many failed expeditions to Indian Territory in search of the captive Parker children sounds authentic, if only because each episode inevitably ends in failure. Like so many storytellers, the real story James was telling was about himself.

  After failing to raise a company of men for his rescue mission, James set out on his own for his first foray into Indian Territory. The eastern part of this semicharted zone had been designated by the federal government for the dispossessed tribes of Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles who had been expelled from their homelands in the eastern United States; the western part was no-man’s-land—wild, rugged, and lawless—where Comanches, Kiowas, and other hostile tribes roamed freely. The only whites who ventured there were traders, outlaws, and hunters prepared to risk their scalps for profit.

  Boastful of his backwoods acumen, James undertook a solitary three-hundred-mile journey to Coffee’s Trading Post on the Red River to see what he could find out about the captives. When he got there he heard that a white woman had been brought to another trading post sixty miles to the north. He constructed a raft with the help of a friend and crossed the Red River, leaving his horse behind. Traveling on foot inside Indian Territory in October with a hard rain pounding daily, James proceeded without food or sleep for three days. He reached his destination only to discover that the white woman wasn’t Rachel. But the traders told him they had seen her at a Comanche camp yet another sixty miles away. They also told him they had heard that the Indians had killed her baby. “This intelligence kindled anew the flame that was raging in my breast,” writes James, who makes clear his journey was as much about vengeance as it was about rescue.

  For four days James followed the Comanche tracks, only to find that the Indians had already broken camp and recrossed the Red River into Texas. He was feverish, hungry, and parched, and he lived in constant fear of ambush. His clothes were drenched by a rainstorm, then frozen in a late-autumn blizzard. He writes that he barely avoided starvation by killing and roasting a skunk.

  Frail, ill, and hungry, James finally abandoned the search. His travels on foot through Indian country had taken a total of two months. “The thought that I was so near my child drove sleep from my eyes,” he wrote. “… I pursued my journey with little hope of being alive at night, or ever again beholding the face of a human being.”

  By mid-November James was back home, his fruitless journey ended. It was the first of many.

  AMONG RACHEL PLUMMER’S many labors as a captive, none was more important to her survival than the monthly quota of buffalo skins that she was required to tan. She would soak the hides to soften and clean them, stretch them out on a wooden frame, scrape them with a sharp tool, and massage them with a mixture of brains, bone marrow, and animal fat. The job kept her busy all day, every day, and into the night; she would take the skins with her in the evening when she took up her other duty: guarding the horses. “I dared not complain,” she recalled.

  Two to three million buffalo roamed Comancheria, floating across the High Plains like vast schools of giant, rumbling fish. “I have often seen the ground covered with them as far as the eye can see,” Rachel would recal
l. Comanches hunted and killed the buffalo with far more reverence than they showed for most humans, honoring and giving thanks to the animal’s spirit even while dismembering its body.

  The dead bison provided food, hardware, clothing, and shelter. Each corpse belonged to the man who had killed it. One of the women in his household would make a quick slit under the belly to allow the steaming insides to cool and to minimize bloating, then pull out the stomach and intestines, which would be cleaned, stuffed with meat, and roasted. The hot, still-quivering raw liver was usually shared among wives and children, who wolfed it down immediately. The tongue was another delicacy; it would be boiled and saved for later. The front shoulders were removed at the joint, cut into thin slices, and spread along the grass or hung on poles to dry into jerky. The stomach lining was washed and used to carry water or as a cooking container. The bladder was inflated like a balloon and dried for use as a water canteen or to store food. The foot bone was separated from the foreleg and the metacarpal was used as a sharp fleshing tool. The sinew was stretched for string, thread, and straps. The hide was staked out, dried, and tanned for use as a teepee cover, clothing, robes, and blankets. The horn sheaths from the dried skull became drinking cups. The mashed brains were stirred into a paste to soften and waterproof the buffalo skin.

  For T. A. “Dot” Babb, who was abducted by Comanches at age thirteen along with his nine-year-old sister, the taste of a dead bison calf’s freshly ingested milk was so intense he could recall it fifty years later. A squaw split open the calf, scooped the milk from its stomach, and distributed it among her children. “It was the sweetest stuff I ever tasted, and was thick like our gelatin,” he said.

  The labor involved in rendering the dead beasts into useful products underscored a basic fact of Comanche life: men were dominant and women at all times subservient. Squaws would lace their babies tightly to cradle boards that they would strap to their backs each morning and set to work. The fresh buffalo skins could weigh up to one hundred pounds; women would carry or drag them to the campsite. “The squaws did all the manual labor and camp work generally, such as setting up or taking down and moving the teepees, carrying the wood and water, doing the cooking,” wrote Babb. “They skinned and dried the buffalo meat, dressed the hides, and prepared all of the food, supplied the drinking water, moved the teepees, and in fact were the servants and menials of their lords in every manner of domestic work and service.”

  Rachel Plummer was treated in effect as the slave of slaves, at the service and mercy of her female masters. But after the murder of her baby boy, Rachel crossed a psychological boundary. Because she no longer wanted to live, she did not fear her captors. She became more brazen and more demanding.

  One day in the Rockies she convinced her younger mistress to accompany her on an exploration of a nearby cave. After seeing the length and depth of the cavern, the girl became alarmed and insisted on going back, and when Rachel refused to leave the girl clubbed her with a piece of wood, Rather than submit, Rachel grabbed another piece of wood and knocked her mistress to the ground. Rachel ignored the girl’s cries, warning her “that if she attempted again to force me to return until I was ready, I would kill her.”

  On another occasion Rachel and the girl were scavenging for edible roots when her mistress ordered Rachel back to camp for a digging tool. Rachel refused to go. When the girl attacked her, Rachel grabbed hold of a large buffalo bone and savagely beat the girl over the head. “I was determined, if they killed me, to make a cripple of her,” she wrote. A group of Indians formed around them as they fought, and Rachel fully expected to be killed on the spot. No one touched her. She finally let go of the girl, who was bleeding profusely from the head. “A new adventure this …” Rachel would recall. To her surprise, “all the Indians seemed as unconcerned as if nothing had taken place. I washed her face and gave her water. She appeared remarkably friendly.”

  A chief took Rachel aside. “You are brave to fight,” he told her. “She began with you, and you had a right to kill her. Your noble spirit forbid you.”

  The girl’s mother was furious. She ordered Rachel to gather straw and it soon became clear she planned to use it to burn Rachel at the stake. But when the woman tried to tie Rachel’s hands, Rachel knocked her down and pushed her into the fire. “As she raised, I knocked her down into the fire again, and kept her there until she was as badly burned as I was,” Rachel wrote. She and the woman fought desperately, breaking through the side of the teepee and spilling outside where other Indians could see them. Once again, no one intervened.

  The next day, twelve chiefs convened a tribunal and ordered Rachel and her two mistresses to appear before them to testify. Afterward, the chiefs ruled that Rachel needed to replace the broken teepee pole. She consented, provided the younger woman agreed to help. “This was made a part of the decree, and all was peace again.”

  BESIDES CLEANING AND TANNING buffalo hides, Rachel’s other duty, just as essential to her Comanche owner’s stature and prosperity, was to look after the horses each night.

  Horses gave Comanches the mobility and the means to conquer their enemies and to kill vast numbers of buffalo, but they also created a huge labor problem: Comanches needed more and more workers, not only to tend to the vast new herds of horses, ponies, and mules, but also to render the buffalo into its various products. And the easiest way to get more workers was the same way Comanches obtained many of life’s other necessities: they stole them.

  Most of the captives were abducted from small defenseless villages in northern Mexico. One rough estimate suggested there were at least two thousand captives by the early 1800s. Besides their need for labor, the Comanches had another economic motive for abduction. Ever since the first exchanges between native peoples and Spanish authorities, trade in human beings had been part of the equation. Prisoners were taken as slaves but also held for ransom or to exchange for prisoners held by the other side. Humans became just one more commodity, and commodities were negotiable.

  There were other, more sentimental reasons for abducting young people. Smallpox, cholera, and other diseases imported from the white world eventually wiped out entire Comanche villages and extended families. From a height of twenty thousand to thirty thousand in the late 1700s, the Comanche population fell to below ten thousand by the 1830s. Comanche women were said to be prone to miscarriage. Child captives were one way to replenish the population and bring comfort to bereaved families.

  A Comanche captive, identified only as “Mexican Boy,” photographed by Will Soule at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in the early 1870s.

  While each captive’s fate was different, certain patterns emerged. Comanche raiders kept those who were young and strong enough to be effective workers, and killed most of the others. Babies and small children who couldn’t keep pace with the raiders who had carried them off, or who cried or caused any inconvenience to their captors, were casually dispatched in the same manner as Rachel Plummer’s baby son.

  The cruelty shown to Rachel by Comanche women was also not unusual. Dolly Webster and her two children were beaten and starved in their first days in captivity, and lacerated periodically by women who had painted themselves in black to mourn fifteen dead warriors. Another young girl taken from Grayson County, Texas, was forced to scrape and clean her own dead mother’s scalp.

  Sarah Ann Horn, an Englishwoman who was abducted by Comanches near the Rio Grande just weeks before Rachel Plummer, wrote her own harrowing account of life as a captive. She and her two young sons were taken in a raid in which her husband was clubbed to death in front of them. Sarah Ann described how the Indians continually dunked the boys, ages three and five, in a stream for their amusement. When Joseph, the younger of the two, slipped off a mule into the water and struggled to regain the shore, a warrior stabbed him in the face with a lance, sending him back into the foaming stream. Her captors, she concluded, were “trained, from infancy to age, to deeds of cruelty and bloodshed … They literally live by slaying and murdering all of
man and beast that come in their way.”

  Yet at the same time, she noted, Comanches were exceedingly tender with each other. There was playfulness, humor, and a willingness to sacrifice all for a fellow tribesman. They loved their own children and indulged them endlessly, and never used corporal punishment.

  Sarah Ann Horn had stumbled upon a fundamental paradox that would long puzzle outsiders who got a glimpse of Comanche life: How could a people be so solicitous of each other yet so cruel and brutal to others? “The strength of their attachment to each other, and the demonstration they give of the same, even to the dividing of the last morsel with each other upon the point of starvation, might put many professed Christians to the blush!” she wrote. “But they are just the reverse of all this to all the world outside.”

  Rape was a fact of life for many captives, although it was seldom discussed by those women who escaped or were ransomed back to the white world. Rachel Plummer’s language in her written account leaves little doubt that she and Elizabeth Kellogg were gang-raped on their first night in captivity. “I would venture to assert [that] … no woman has, in the last thirty years, been taken prisoner by any wild Indians who did not, as soon after as practicable, become a victim to the brutality of every one of the party of her captors,” wrote Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, who served throughout the Great Plains. T. R. Fehrenbach, the most widely read of modern Texas historians, echoed Dodge’s words: “To the Plains tribes all females were chattels, and despite a great deal of studied delicacy on the subject, there was never to be a known case of white women captives who were not subjected to abuse and rape.”