The Searchers Read online

  James’s career as a Baptist clergyman was no less turbulent. In 1841 he was excommunicated from his local church after congregants accused him of dishonesty, and three followers split off with him to form a new church. Two years later, one of his supporters, Susan Tinsley, accused him of lying about the amounts of ransom he had paid out for his relatives and other captives, of slander, fraud and of “holding correspondence with suspicious characters.” James was excluded from the new church.

  While James played the role of searcher, avenger, and angry paterfamilias, his older brother Daniel stuck to preaching. Under the Texas constitution, ministers were not allowed to serve in the legislature; still, Daniel wielded political influence throughout the early days of the republic. He founded at least nine Baptist churches in Texas under the “Union Association of the Regular Baptists,” and prided himself on his stamina, regularly preaching four-hour marathon sermons into his sixties. In August 1844, at the relatively advanced age of sixty-three, he undertook a grueling trip to visit some of the churches, but had to cut it short when he fell ill. “My time is at hand and I must be offered up,” he said. “I do not the least dread it. My Master calls. I long to obey.”

  Even on his deathbed, his son John wrote, Daniel was still focused on the weaknesses of mankind. He “lamented that thear was many of the deer Lambs of Jesus who was blinded by the cunning craftiness of wicked men that lie in wait to deceive.” Daniel died on December 3 and was buried the next day “amid … cryes and tears from his numerous friends.”

  JAMES PARKER CONTINUED TO SEARCH for Cynthia Ann. When he heard of a young white woman who had been freed from Indian captivity in Missouri, he journeyed north again in vain. Afterward, he wrote a letter to the Texas National Register, describing the girl so that her relatives might recover her. “I wish to make this public, because I know from experience the anxiety of the bereaved, and wish as far as lies in my power, to alleviate distress,” he declared. For all his braggadocio, James had a heart.

  Still hungry for vindication, he published his ninety-page narrative that same year. He appended at the end of it a new edition of Rachel’s tale as well, with the clear aim of garnering more admiration and readers for his own dubious story by connecting it with that of his more sympathetic daughter. It’s clear that James edited Rachel’s text to suit his own needs. The second edition makes no mention of Rachel’s husband Luther, who by 1844 held a prominent place on James’s long list of enemies.

  After Daniel’s death, James became involved in the workings of his older brother’s Pilgrim Regular Predestinarian Baptist Church, formally joining the congregation in May 1845 and seeking ordination to preach at an affiliated congregation. It is clear from church records that he hoped to take Daniel’s place as leader, but equally clear that the congregation was wary of this obsessed and ambitious man. A January 1846 note records a private letter from a congregant urging the church to delay James’s ordination and stating, “Brother JW Parker informd the church that he had got angry and had even come very near shooting a man.”

  By October, the elders appeared even more concerned, although reluctant to totally part ways with the brother of their late revered leader. While the church’s ruling body proclaimed James’s virtues, it added “that we believe the church has bin and continues to be unjustly implecated on his account as well we believe that Bro Parker[’s] reputation has as unjustly bin assailed by those calling themselves Baptists and we believe Bro Parkers usefulness has greatly bin destroid by this unlawful course.”

  James never did achieve ordination. In February 1851 he was accused of “using intoxicating spirits to too great an excess.” One month later he was excommunicated. It was the last time his name was mentioned in the minutes of Pilgrim Church—or in any other public document. James Parker’s recorded life was over, and so apparently was his search for Cynthia Ann. Perhaps his health did not allow him to continue. Or perhaps the fact that by now his niece was a woman in her twenties and surely the wife or concubine, voluntary or not, of a Comanche warrior caused James to lose interest in finding her. Unlike his fictional counterpart a century later, James Parker would search no more.

  4.

  The Rescue (Pease River, 1860)

  A key moment in many melodramatic captivity narratives was the sighting of the innocent abductee by her would-be rescuers. In an all-too-brief encounter, the rescuers discover that the victim is a lost soul beyond the reach of civilization, condemned to remain in the clutches of depraved savagery.

  So it was with Cynthia Ann Parker over the years as she grew from a little girl into a young woman. While James Parker never succeeded in finding his abducted niece, others did. Their accounts of who she had become and why they failed to secure her release do not get us very far in establishing the truth of her life and times as an Indian woman. But the stories do reveal a lot about white attitudes toward female captives and Comanches.

  A retired army colonel and Indian agent named Leonard Williams first reported seeing her among Comanches camped along the Canadian River in 1846. Williams sought to purchase her release but was told the Comanches would fight rather than surrender her. He was allowed to speak to her, but she refused to answer questions, even when he pleaded with her to send a message through him to her family. He claimed that her lips quivered and she fought to control her emotions, and he speculated that she had been warned not to talk to him and was afraid of “future bad treatment” by her captors if she did. A report in the Clarksville Northern Standard says “she continued to weep incessantly” during his visit. Williams finally fled the encampment after being warned by a tribal elder that the younger warriors were planning to kill him.

  Cynthia Ann was nineteen at the time—of marriageable age. By custom Peta Nocona, her supposed abductor, owned the right to wed her. We do not know when nor why, but according to Comanche oral tradition he chose to make her one of his wives. Even this claim—one of the crucial parts of the legend of Cynthia Ann—is not beyond challenge, as we’ll see.

  Pierce M. Butler and M. G. Lewis, two federal Indian commissioners who forged a series of peace treaties with Native American bands in North Texas, reported to Congress their version of Williams’s visit, which was likely closer to the truth but far less comforting for those seeking to redeem the fair damsel from savagery. They concluded that she had no wish to be rescued. Their scouts had seen her “on the head of the Washita [River].” By now she was married, and it was clear to the commissioners that “from the influence of her alleged husband, or from her own inclination, she is unwilling to leave the people with whom she associates.” Although a large amount in cash and goods was offered for her release, they reported, “she would run off and hide herself to avoid those who went to ransom her.”

  Cynthia Ann’s Comanche name was Naudah—“Keeps Warm with Us.” She spoke Comanche as well as a bastardized form of Spanish, but had shed her English like a layer of dead skin. Her light-colored face and blond hair had grown dark from dirt, grease, and paint. Her body had become heavy and callused from a steady diet of buffalo meat and a life of demanding physical labor.

  While Williams and the Indian commissioners make no mention of children, sometime between the mid-1840s and the early 1850s Naudah must have given birth to her first child. The birth process was a communal event for Comanches, overseen by the women elders while the men stayed far away. The women set up the pregnant woman in her own lodge, with a floor of soft earth. They dug two pits, one for heating water and the other for the afterbirth, and they drove four-foot-long stakes into the ground that the mother-to-be could grip during childbirth. A medicine woman baked rocks and sage, creating an aromatic steam. After the baby was born, the women launched into a joyful chant. Even childbirth was an occasion for storytelling and omens. The medicine woman cut the umbilical cord and hung it in a hackberry tree. If the cord was left undisturbed until it rotted, the child would enjoy a long, happy life. The medicine woman would fling the afterbirth into a running stream, while
the newborn would be wrapped in soft rabbit skins and placed in a cradle board.

  Cynthia Ann’s firstborn was a boy. Just as his birthdate is uncertain, so is his birth name. It may have been Tseetah, meaning “Eagle,” or it may have been Quanah, meaning “Sweet Smell”—one Comanche legend claims he was born in a bed of wildflowers. Soon there would be a second boy named Pecos, and several years later a girl they would name Topsannah or Totsiya, meaning “Prairie Flower.”

  There were other, more fanciful sightings of the white Comanche. Victor M. Rose, a Texas newspaperman, and entrepreneur, would report that a party of white hunters, including friends of the Parkers, had seen her at a Comanche encampment on the upper Canadian River curling into modern-day New Mexico around 1851. By then, Rose claimed, she had two sons. When the hunters asked her to leave with them, he wrote, “She shook her head in a sorrowful negative, and pointed to her little, naked barbarians sporting at her feet, and to the great, greasy, lazy buck sleeping in the shade near at hand, the locks of a score of scalps dangling at his belt, and whose first utterance upon arousing would be a stern command to his meek, pale-faced wife.” She told the hunters, “I am happily wedded. I love my husband, who is good and kind, and my little ones who, too, are his, and I cannot forsake them!”

  It’s a fine but unlikely quote, impossible to verify. Rose offered this account in the 1880s, many years after the fact, never naming his sources. He himself was eleven years old when the encounter purportedly took place. None of which has prevented subsequent historians from citing it as truth. It snugly fit white sensibilities, if not the facts.

  Even Cynthia Ann’s brother John reputedly failed to persuade her to return to her white family. U.S. Army colonel Randolph B. Marcy reported meeting John while conducting an expedition up the Red River in 1852. John told Marcy that his mother had sent him back to the Comanches to make contact with Cynthia Ann and bring her home. “She refused to listen to the proposition,” Marcy reported, “saying that her husband, children, and all that she held most dear, were with the Indians and there she should remain.”

  After his encounter with Marcy, John Parker’s own trail grows cold. Like many former captives, John had trouble readjusting to white civilization, and according to legend he eventually rejoined a Comanche band. The story goes that he was wounded in a raid and left behind, but another Comanche captive, a young Mexican woman, nursed him back to health and fell in love with him. The couple crossed the Rio Grande and settled on a ranch in Mexico, where they lived a long and happy life. It is a romantic and optimistic fable. Cynthia Ann, by contrast, later told relatives she had heard that John had died of smallpox just a few years after their abduction.

  In truth, the white world, despite tantalizing glimpses of Cynthia Ann, did not know where she was and could not reach her. “She seemed to be separated from her own people as effectively as if she had been transported to another continent,” wrote the Texas historian Rupert N. Richardson.

  Still, in all the witness accounts, reliable or fanciful, one thing was clear: Cynthia Ann Parker had become a Comanche.

  BY THE END OF 1852 the army had established seven new outposts in strategic locations around North and West Texas. The forts—most of them so makeshift they barely deserved the name—were designed to form a protective ring around white settlements, but each attracted even more settlers, who felt safer under its flimsy shadow. The pioneers inevitably homesteaded well beyond the zone of protection, making tempting targets for Comanche raiders. The cavalry, stretched thin, poorly supplied, underpaid, and caught between hostile entities, proved incapable of preventing each side from slaughtering or abducting the women and children of the other. Into the security vacuum, the state legislature reconstituted and injected the Texas Rangers and volunteer companies who functioned as vigilantes and saw it as their mission to either drive the Indians from the frontier or wipe them out.

  The savage war of peace between Texans and Comanches was now in full destructive bloom, a violent adolescent tearing at its own flesh.

  In January 1858 the legislature authorized Governor H. G. Runnels to expand the Texas Rangers by an additional one hundred men. The man he chose to lead the new unit was John Salmon “Rip” Ford, a veteran politician, newspaper editor, and Indian fighter. Ford joined forces with Shapley Prince Ross, an Indian agent from Waco. They mounted a force of 102 Rangers and 113 Indian allies and set out north in April. A few weeks later they caught up to a large camp of Comanches on the Canadian River at the edge of Indian Territory. Iron Jacket, a medicine man of renown, came forward to greet them waving a white flag and wearing his trademark breastplate of Spanish armor. A Texan rifleman took aim and shot him in the head. Then the Rangers charged the camp. Many women and children were killed, as Ford himself laconically conceded. “It was not an easy matter to distinguish Indian warriors from squaws,” he offered by way of justification.

  The next targets were the two Indian reservations established in northern Texas under federal protection. Settlers and their leaders claimed that hostile Indians were using both as launching pads for raids and depredations. Led by John S. Baylor, a former Indian agent who championed the extermination of any Indian who dared step foot in Texas, settlers organized guerrilla bands that attacked Indian villages at night with the same vicious brutality of Comanche raiders. Six white men were arrested for killing seven Indians while they slept, but were released after the authorities concluded that no court in Texas would convict them. Baylor threatened to attack any soldiers who stood in his way. His former boss and nemesis, Robert Neighbors, who infuriated the settlers because he sought to protect the reservation Indians, was finally compelled to organize the expulsion of all the tribesmen to Indian Territory north of the Red River in September 1859. Upon his return, Neighbors was shot in the back at close range on a street in Fort Belknap by a settler. Few Texans mourned his demise.

  The expulsions did nothing to quell the violence or the state of panic that gripped settlers by the fall of 1860. The pioneers may have had history and progress on their side, but neither provided any protection when Comanche raiders showed up at their doorstep. Their fear, anger, and sense of desperation were captured in the pages of the White Man newspaper, published in Weatherford by Baylor, who railed against both the Army and the Rangers. A typical article in September 1860 reported that the roads of northern Texas were choked with settlers fleeing the region. “The federal government has displayed a cold indifference to our condition that would do credit to the Czar of Russia,” opined the newspaper.

  The Rangers always seemed one day late and one step behind. B. F. Gholson, a ranch hand who served for a time as a Ranger, recalled trailing a band of Indians through the Nones Valley. The Rangers came across a man’s body, pierced like a pincushion with dozens of arrows, and five hundred yards away a small wagon with the body of a seven-year-old boy, the dead man’s son, “with both eyes shot out and his throat cut, lying on his back.” A short distance farther was his mother’s mangled corpse. “The throat had been cut and the head scalped … and two large wounds were made with a knife in her left side, near her heart. Her body was horribly mutilated and she had been raped.”

  Perhaps the worst moment came that November when a raiding party of some fifty Kiowas and Comanches rampaged through the rolling limestone plains of four counties in Northeast Texas, killing at least six settlers, five of them women. The Indians attacked the Sherman homestead in Parker County, raping, torturing, and scalping Martha Sherman, a pregnant mother of two, who lingered for three days before dying. Then they killed a woman and her husband at the Lynn homestead along the Upper Keechi River. When Charles Goodnight, a young Ranger scout, got to the Lynn house, he walked in on the dead woman’s father. The man was hunched over “a large log fire in the old-fashioned fireplace with a long forked dogwood stick on which was an Indian scalp thoroughly salted. The hair was tucked inside. As he turned it carefully over the fire, the grease oozed out of it, and it had drawn up until it looked as thick
as a buffalo bull’s scalp. As I entered he looked back over his shoulder and bid me good morning, and then turned to his work of roasting the scalp. I don’t think I ever looked at so sad a face.”

  Goodnight and a local posse attempted to track down the raiders. They came back reporting they had located a large encampment of Comanches along the Pease River to the north.

  The task of pursuing them fell to Lawrence Sullivan Ross, Shapley’s son, a fresh-faced, energetic, and supremely ambitious twenty-two-year-old rancher from Waco. He had been commissioned as a captain in the Texas Rangers by Sam Houston, who had recently returned to the governor’s mansion after thirteen years in the U.S. Senate. Sul Ross was described by fellow Ranger James Thomas Pollard as “a fine horseman and a good shot and was not afraid of anything except a rattlesnake.” But Ross was not well loved by local settlers, who viewed him as too sympathetic to the reservation Indians.

  Ross, mindful that his own reputation and that of the Rangers as Indian fighters were none too high, declared his intention “to curb the insolence of these implacable hereditary enemies of Texas” and to “carry the war into their own homes.” His unit of twenty Rangers joined forces with some seventy volunteer militiamen under Captain Jack Cureton and twenty troopers of the Second Cavalry under First Sergeant John W. Spangler. Together, they set out for the Pease River.