For three months they had trekked south from Illinois—some two hundred men, women, and children and twenty-five ox-drawn wagons, crossing the vast, alarming Mississippi near what is now the town of Chester, Missouri, tethered to long rafts like papooses strapped tightly to their mothers’ backs, then navigating the tenuous Southwest Trail through Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana, a virgin landscape of rolling hills, deep valleys, and thick marshes. Because the wagons had no suspension to quell the jarring of deep furrows in the rough-cut dirt pathway, few of the pilgrims rode inside; instead they plodded on foot alongside the wagons with a steady, determined pace. The teamsters walked alongside as well, cajoling the oxen teams with a rhythmic monologue punctuated by the periodic crack of the whip, the entire wagon train a noisy, hesitant organism pulling itself toward an unseen destination, a colony with a name both blunt and mysterious: Texas.
The trek had a dual purpose: a fresh start on fertile soil for yeomen who relied upon the earth for sustenance and survival; but also a way and means to reconsecrate their covenant with God. Each Saturday evening as the autumn sun retreated, the pilgrims stopped to pitch tents and prepare for a Sabbath of worship and rest under the vigilant instruction of the Reverend Daniel Parker, farmer, politician, Indian fighter, and raw-boned Baptist preacher. “Thus was the wilderness—the home of the Savage and the wild beasts of the forest—made vocal with hymns of praise to the most high God, by this pilgrim brand of christians,” wrote James W. Parker, Daniel’s devoted younger brother.
In mid-November they reached the brown, placid Sabine River, bordered by pine trees as tall and erect as sentinels, and crossed over into Texas. They camped that first evening, November 12, 1833, near San Augustine, twenty miles deep inside their new promised land, just in time for one of the most awesome celestial events in human history.
On the Night the Stars Fell, the heavens blazed with shooting stars as large as moons trailing clouds of bluish light like divine afterthoughts. Although well past midnight, the bright burning sky illuminated the wide, awestruck faces of the pilgrims as if it were high noon. For some of them, already predisposed to millennial visions, it was impossible not to detect the hand of God. “The old women seemed to think the Day of Judgment had come like a thief in the night,” recalled Garrison Greenwood, Daniel Parker’s first cousin.
Daniel was equally stunned. Was God blessing their journey, or was He warning of dangers ahead? Daniel, within whom zealotry and common sense waged a ceaseless struggle, could not say for sure. But after the celestial light show he and his followers could not sleep. “The remainder of the night was spent in prayer,” Greenwood recalled.
It was a fitting moment in the long spiritual and geographical journey of the preacher, his family, and his flock. The Parkers, after all, believed in omens, sought miracles, and created narratives out of the sky, the wind, and the weather.
As they traveled deeper and deeper into the American wilderness, they fashioned their own myth to fit their religious beliefs and their patriotic fervor, a myth in which the Lord and the Land were seamlessly interwoven. Although they seldom wrote it down, they were storytellers whose most compelling characters were themselves. According to the broad brushstrokes of their self-portrait, they were God’s righteous pilgrims, preaching His gospel and living their lives according to His commandments. They were children of the Second Great Awakening, a burst of passionate, postmillennial fervor that inflamed the hearts, minds, and imaginations of Americans who believed they had a special mission and that their own good deeds and the rise of a great new nation would somehow hasten the day when Christ would return to rule the earth. And they were pioneers—rough-hewn, self-sufficient, beholden to no one but God—spreading their brand of civilization to a richly abundant but untamed territory. They were the living reality of George Caleb Bingham’s painting of Daniel Boone, like a frontier Moses, escorting settlers through the Cumberland Gap to the promised land.
The Parkers had come to the American colonies a century earlier, refugees from the hierarchical but unstable world of seventeenth-century England. They were a restless, unschooled, and unruly clan, one of many that drove inland from the Atlantic seaboard in the years after the Revolutionary War shattered British colonial rule and kicked open the gates to western settlement.
The patriarch, Elder John Parker, was born in Baltimore County, Maryland, in 1758, moved to Culpeper County in the Virginia piedmont in the 1770s, and served two militia hitches with his younger brother in the War of Independence. Elder John moved to Georgia in 1785 in search of richer farmland and more pious brethren. There he unsuccessfully sought to start a cotton farm, then headed west, first to Tennessee in 1803 and then to Illinois in 1824—“the Bible in one hand and the reins of the future in the other,” as a family history proclaims. Along the way he acquired a wife, eight sons, four daughters, and a primitive brand of Calvinism. He also acquired the nickname “Squealing Johnny” for his emphatic sermonizing. But his reputation for piety was mixed. The minutes of Turnbull Church in Dickson County, Tennessee, record that on April 7, 1809, John Parker came before the elders to acknowledge the sin of drunkenness. “The Church agreed to wait with him awhile,” they noted. Another entry suggests that he was excommunicated after accusations of betting on a horse race.
By the time he got to Coles County in southeastern Illinois, John Parker called himself a “Two-Seed Baptist Traveling Preacher.” He held the first church service in the history of the county in his own log cabin with eleven people in attendance—the entire adult white population. He once closed a sermon with the announcement that he would be back again “to preach at that place, that day in four weeks if it was not a good day for bee hunting.”
The Parkers were the thin edge of a rough-hewn frontier movement—not so much the paragons of civilization but, as Texas historian T. R. Fehrenbach put it, “civilization’s heroic and necessary vanguard.” A less forgiving observer might say they failed their way west. In each place they settled, they eventually wore out their soil and their welcome, then moved on to what looked like a better opportunity. They had little formal schooling. Daniel, the eldest child, born in Virginia in 1781 but raised in Georgia, said he grew up “without an education, except to read in the New Testament, but very imperfect.” He added, “To this day I have never examined the English Grammar five minutes, neither do I understand even one rule in the Arithmetic.” In his youth, he later wrote, he “ranged the woods as a hunter, nearly as much in company with Indians as with the whites.” James Parker, the ninth child and sixth son, born in Georgia in 1797, said he was “raised a back woodsman … the advantages for obtaining an education being very limited, I was not enabled to do more than learn to read.” His own great pleasures, he reported, lay elsewhere: “hunting, fishing, and trapping.”
Daniel and James emerged as the natural leaders of the new generation of Parkers. They left no photographs and few physical descriptions, but the impression they made on others was often enduring. Ordained in Tennessee in 1806, Daniel preached the gospel even though it was largely unpaid work. He farmed at night so that he would be free to sermonize during the day, and he rode a suffering, unshod horse for two years because he could not afford horseshoes. “Farming was my only way to make a support,” he wrote. “I avoided everything like trade or traffic, lest I should bring reproach on the tender cause of God.”
Some found him enchanting. James Ross, a church elder, was unmoved by Daniel’s physical appearance—“a small, dry-looking man, of the gipsy [sic] type, with black eyes and hair and dark complexion”—nor by the ritual he performed before sermonizing: pulling off his coat and vest and laying them carefully on the pulpit, and unbuttoning his short collar as if preparing for fisticuffs. “After this preparation it is almost incredible with what ease and fluency he spoke,” Ross wrote. “He seemed full of his subject, and went through it in a way that was truly wonderful.”
Others were appalled. John Mason Peck, a rival Baptist minister in Illinois, depicted Daniel as “without education, uncouth in manners, slovenly in dress, diminutive in person, unprepossessing in appearance, with shriveled features and a small piercing eye … with a zeal and enthusiasm bordering on insanity.”
Daniel was devout, passionate, and demanding—an evangelical preacher in constant search of a new pulpit; James entrepreneurial, opportunistic, and impetuous—a land speculator, horse trader, and perhaps much worse. And as James idolized Daniel, so did Silas Parker, born in Tennessee in 1804, seem to worship his older brother James, following him faithfully down dangerous paths.
They were tribesmen and warriors, just one tenuous step removed from barbarism. Not so different, in truth, from the native peoples they fought along the way. In the story the Parkers and their fellow frontiersmen were creating about the conquest of the West, Indians were the Other—inhuman, barbaric, and easily manipulated. Even in the Declaration of Independence, among some of history’s most ringing celebrations of the human spirit, Thomas Jefferson evoked the evil specter of Indians, accusing George III of having “endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.”
John Parker, one of the brothers, was killed by Delaware Indians near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in 1811. James wrote that his brother’s death “awakened in me feelings of the most bitter hostility towards the Indians, and I firmly resolved upon and impatiently awaited for an opportunity to avenge his death.”
Daniel and his younger brother Isaac served in the Tennessee volunteer militia of General Andrew Jackson under a young commander named Sam Houston, vanquishing Creek Indians allied with the British during the War of 1812. Indians and settlers traded massacres and retribution in an escalating spiral of bloody deeds. The Creeks carried out a brutal massacre at Fort Mims in Alabama in August 1813, slaughtering more than 250 volunteers and their families, mutilating women, and smashing small children’s heads against the stockade walls. At Tallushatchee and Talladega, Jackson and his men took their revenge. “We now shot them down like dogs,” boasted one of the volunteers, the soon-to-be legendary David Crockett. The myth of Indian fighters Jackson, Houston, and Crockett was born.
Daniel, the most impassioned preacher among the Parkers, was the most successful politician as well. He served as a state assemblyman for two terms in Illinois. Church and state were separate in practice as well as principle in the early days of the American republic, and Daniel’s published appeal for votes made no mention of his religious beliefs. His neighbors described him “as a man of truth and as a man of talents and of liberal and Republican principles.” In 1823 he and fourteen other Illinois lawmakers banded together to block an attempt to legalize slavery in the state.
Still, his Calvinism was anything but liberal, embracing a fierce, unyielding vision of mankind as pathetic and weak, devoid of free will, and incapable of virtue. It was a hard faith that mistrusted human nature as sinful and easily corrupted. “We believe that God created man good and upright,” his church constitution proclaimed, “but that man by his sins and transgressions has become dead in trespasses and sins and is utterly unable to change his own heart, or to deliver himself from the fallen depraved state which he has fallen into under the influence of the Power of Darkness.”
* * *
TEXAS SEEMED VAST ENOUGH to hold the Parker clan and their visions. American settlers had been trickling in since the early 1800s, but in 1824 the Mexican government officially opened the province to foreign immigration. Every able-bodied white man could claim 4,428 acres for just thirty dollars in one of the privately owned colonies that the Mexican authorities had sanctioned in hopes of creating a buffer between their small communities and hostile Indian tribes to the north. Stephen F. Austin, a young Virginia-born lawyer living in New Orleans who became an authorized empresario for the first colony, sang the praises of the gently rolling land between the burgeoning new town of Nacogdoches and the Sabine River: “The grass is more abundant and of a ranker and more luxuriant growth than I have ever seen before in any country and is indicative of a strong rich soil.”
Like the Parkers, many of the newcomers were farmers who hauled their families and livestock to the new frontier seeking a fresh start on free land. The new American peasantry was hardworking, self-sufficient, and resolutely egalitarian: they shook hands rather than bowed. Many were refugees from the Panic of 1819, when the fledgling American banking system had collapsed and thousands of smallholders lost their farms. “Gone to Texas” became a familiar sign hung on the doors of log cabins across the South. Alongside the pioneers were men of greater ambitions and lesser repute, gamblers and adventurers like James Bowie, a Kentucky-born slave trader, Indian fighter, smuggler, and land speculator; William Barret Travis, an Alabama lawyer fleeing serious debts and an unfaithful wife; and Crockett himself, seeking new fortune and redemption after losing his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. And some were far worse. “A great number of the foreigners who have entered the frontier are vicious and wild men with evil ways,” reported Mexican general Manuel de Mier y Terán, who led a fact-finding mission to the colony in 1827. “Some of them are fugitive criminals from the neighboring republic; within our borders they create disturbances and even criminal acts.”
James W. Parker was restless in Illinois—“that country being very sickly,” he reported after three of his nine children died of fever—and always looking for new pastures. He was the first Parker to visit Texas; in 1831 he explored the forested eastern half, riding through areas teeming with wild game and fertile soil, and lived for a season along the Colorado River, which began in the High Plains of what is now the Texas Panhandle and flowed southeast to Matagorda Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Hostile Indians, as always, were a problem: James noted that several of his neighbors were killed during his stay; one of them, a Mr. Wilbarger, “was literally shot to pieces, scalped and left as dead.” Still, James traveled back to Illinois with a positive report for his brothers. He returned to Texas two years later with his wife and six children and three of his brothers: Daniel, Benjamin, and Joseph. Younger brother Silas came separately.
Doctrinal battles with Methodists and his fellow Baptists in Illinois had taken their toll on Daniel, and he was ready for a new spiritual home. The laws of Catholic-dominated Mexico forbade the organization of a new Protestant church within its borders, but they did not prohibit Protestants from bringing in a preexisting church from outside. He founded the Pilgrim Predestinarian Regular Baptist Church on August 11, 1833, in his house in Crawford County, with himself as moderator and six other members, then set out the next day for Texas with all six and their families, along with his father and brothers. Before he left for Texas, Elder John applied for and received a government pension of $80 per month for his Revolutionary War service.
Thirteen of Daniel’s constituents in Illinois signed a character certificate that he carried with him to the new colony; Daniel Parker, they averred, was “an honest man and a good citizen” who had “discharged his duty faithfully to the satisfaction of a majority of his constituents.” Others were less sorry to see him go. “Mr. Parker, you are an Enemy to truth and your doctrine came from hell and will go back there again,” wrote one anonymous letter writer.
Many of the new colonists chose land close to the small towns and villages rising up in southeast Texas for their own safety and sense of community. But James and Silas Parker were more daring. They picked out a promising patch of farmland near the banks of the Navasota River, a narrow branch of the Brazos. With crude handmade tools and farming implements, no fertilizer or irrigation, and little cash, the Parkers needed to choose their new property wisely. The Navasota coursed along a seam of dark, rich bottomland where the woodlands of the southeast slowly gave way to the high plains of the north.
James liked what he saw. This was, he believed, his promised land. “The country on the Navasott is the most fertile, most healthy, and subject to fewer objections than any other part of Texas,” he wrote. “There are springs in this section that afford water enough to run a mill. The timber is very large, and of an excellent quality. The rock found along these creeks … is well adapted for building purposes. The range for stock is not surpassed in any country.”
But the garden was not empty. Several thousand Indians—mostly Caddos, Wichitas, and Kichais—lived in villages along the river banks. They were farmers, hunters, and gatherers, and many of their settlements dated back hundreds of years. Farther to the north and west were thousands more native peoples—Comanches, Lipan Apaches, and Kiowas—who lived a more nomadic and aggressive existence on horseback in the high, arid limestone plains where white men seldom ventured.
Between these two dramatically distinct regions was a thick belt of forest land known as the Cross Timbers that stretched from southeastern Kansas through the heart of the Indian territories—what is now Oklahoma—and into northern Texas. Washington Irving, who traveled the area in 1832, described a rough terrain of open rolling hills and deep ravines. The land was pleasant during the spring rains when the vegetation grew green and damp, but by the time Irving and his party arrived in the fall, “the herbage was parched; the foliage of the scrubby forests was withered; the whole woodland prospect, as far as the eye could reach, had a brown and arid hue.” Frequent fires scorched and calcified the vegetation, “leaving them black and hard, so as to tear the flesh of man and horse that had to scramble through them … It was like struggling through forests of cast iron.”
To James Parker, the Cross Timbers seemed like a natural boundary line between the northernmost reaches of white settlement and the southern fringe of Indian territory. But the Comanches, masters of horsemanship and mobility, treated the Timbers like an open door. For decades they swooped down every spring to hunt game and raid other tribes for horses and food. James didn’t seem to grasp—or chose to ignore—that he was putting himself and his extended family in jeopardy. His younger brother Silas went along.
Daniel Parker chose not to. When he and his caravan arrived in Texas in December 1833, he broke away from James and Silas and settled farther to the south and east, in what is now the town of Elkhart. Daniel feared the new colony that James had in mind was too close to the hostile native peoples and too isolated from the rest of the settler community. He also did not care to preach to an empty choir. He quickly became a prominent member of the fledgling community and served, as in Illinois, as a legislator. Meanwhile, James, Silas, and their older brother Benjamin, a recent widower at age forty-eight, continued along with Elder John and their families to the banks of the Navasota, where they set up camp and began to farm.
The Parkers were a distinctly American breed—both settlers and warriors. They always traveled with their families, and their homes formed their front line, exposing their wives and children to whatever dangers existed. James Parker and his wife, Martha, brought six children with them to the new settlement. Their red-haired, eighteen-year-old daughter Rachel, married to a prosperous young farmer named Luther Plummer, was the first to give birth in the new colony in January 1835. Rachel and Luther named their son James Pratt, after her father. Sarah, another of James’s and Martha’s daughters, married Lorenzo Nixon on March 26, 1836, with Elder John, her grandfather, presiding. Silas and his wife, Lucy, who was Martha’s sister, had four children. The oldest, Cynthia Ann, born in Illinois in 1827, was a blonde, blue-eyed princess who prowled the new farmland as if it were her private preserve and licked fresh warm milk from the cows.
The local Indians felt hemmed in and besieged by the interlopers. Hostilities began with the theft of horses and cattle, each side raiding the other. James Parker helped establish treaties with a dozen local chiefs, but not all Indians, nor all whites, honored these arrangements. In July 1835, a band of white settlers seeking stolen horses attacked a Kichai village that had signed a peace accord. The Indian villagers greatly outnumbered the white attackers, who were forced to flee to the Parker settlement. On another occasion, a party of white settlers led by a Colonel Burleson discovered stolen American horses in the possession of two Caddo chiefs, whom they seized and tied to a tree. The chiefs claimed they had recovered the horses on behalf of the colonists but the men refused to believe them. They shot the two chiefs in cold blood. The wife of one of the Indians reported to her fellow tribesmen what had happened.
James Parker styled himself as a Man Who Knows Indians—their customs, their way of thinking, and their purported talent for treachery. But when it came to Comanches, the most warlike of the native peoples, James knew little. To him these Indians were just another potential obstacle on the road to prosperity and redemption, to be outmaneuvered or eliminated depending upon their level of resistance. “If this region was not infested by hostile Indians, it would be very soon settled,” James would write, as if the natives were a particularly noxious species of disease, “and when once settled and cultivated by civilized man, it will approximate to an earthly paradise.”
At first the colonists and Comanches circled each other warily, trading horses, food, and firearms. Comanches expected gifts and tribute. It took time for them to discover that the Texans were more aggressive and less pliable than their Mexican neighbors, just as it took time for Texans to realize the Comanches were impossible to intimidate and harder to kill than most Indians. Still, the gap was wide and bloodstained. Each group told stories about the other, and they were inevitably tales of bloodshed and destruction.
JAMES W. PARKER had extravagantly promised Stephen Austin that he could attract dozens of Americans to his new settlement, but very few actually came. Still, he was a man to seize opportunities. Early on, there were allegations that James was engaged in dealings with local Indians, paying them in counterfeit money for stolen horses. These claims were never proven but they were a calumny that long haunted James’s good name—after all, in Texas the only thing worse than a horse thief was a man who colluded with savages. James solemnly denied the allegations, saying his accusers were seeking “to destroy my reputation, degrade my family, and make my life a burden to me.”
His new settlement, being far removed from the rest of the pioneer community, was increasingly vulnerable as hostilities between native peoples and newcomers intensified. To protect their families and their livestock, the Parkers in 1835 built a stockade of a half dozen cabins and two blockhouses enclosed by a twelve-foot-tall fence of split cedar timbers. It was home to about forty men, women and children—Parkers, Faulkenberrys, Anglins, and Frosts, all of them related by blood or marriage—and was crammed with farm tools, implements, and supplies, barefoot youngsters with dirty necks, and barnyard animals. The settlers had no nails, screws, or bolts; instead, they split and notched their logs so that the pieces fit snugly together like the fingers of a pair of folded hands. They did their cooking inside the cabins and slept in makeshift lofts that served both as beds and storage areas. Privacy was minimal, clothing was harsh burlap, bathing with strong homemade soap was an occasion rather than an everyday occurrence. The blockhouses were placed at diagonal ends of the fort; the second stories projected beyond the stockade walls and there were gun slots in the floor and on all four walls. At night the livestock were brought inside the walls for protection.
Old Fort Parker Cabin, July 2008, Groesbeck, Texas. The replica fort was built in 1936 for the centennial of Texas independence and the raid in which Indians abducted Cynthia Ann Parker and four relatives.
James and Silas formed one of the original three Texas Ranger companies, which began using Parker’s Fort as a base of operations. The Texas General Council authorized Silas to contract and employ twenty-five men, at a salary of $1.25 per day, “to secure the inhabitants residing on the frontiers from the invasions of the hostile Indians.” The Indians increasingly viewed the fort as a military installation, not a settlement. In any case, it didn’t really matter: settlements, after all, were fair game in the intimate warfare both sides engaged in.
The winter of 1836 was a desperate time for local Indians, with many deaths due to hunger and disease. They blamed the white settlers for both. According to Comanche oral tradition, a young warrior named Peta Nocona stepped forward to challenge others to join him in a raid on the Texans. Nocona styled himself a wanderer—a man of no fixed ties or kinship in a community in which kinship was essential for survival. But his warrior skills and his single-minded determination won him respect. He was feared, not loved, neither a chief nor a foot soldier.
The settlers had other reasons to be fearful. Relations between the colonists and the central government in Mexico City were disintegrating due to conflicts over land, money, and control. Daniel Parker was aligned at first with the peace camp that sought reconciliation with the Mexican regime. But the lines quickly shifted and moderates hardened into hawks. Daniel participated in the popular Consultation Assembly that met on November 3, 1835, and approved a “Declaration of the People of Texas,” forming a provisional government even while pledging loyalty to the 1824 constitution under which many of the colonists had entered Texas. They pledged to resist General Antonio López de Santa Anna, the military leader who had seized control of the government in Mexico City. Daniel signed his name just below that of his old militia commander, Sam Houston, by now a registered resident of the municipalidad of Nacogdoches.
As hostilities spiraled, Daniel became one of the original signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence and joined the Council of the Provisional Government. Santa Anna mustered a force of 5,000 soldiers and invaded Texas, laid siege to and conquered the Alamo, the fortified mission in San Antonio, killing all of its 189 defenders—including Bowie, Travis, and Crockett—on March 6, 1836, then slowly pushed north. Although their fort was more than 200 miles northeast of San Antonio, the Parkers and their neighbors abandoned the stockade and fled east toward the Trinity River for fear that the Mexicans and the Indians would forge an unholy alliance and overrun their small settlement. Houston, appointed as commander of the ragtag Texas army, sent out dispatches urging settlers to flee. But rain fell steadily and the Trinity was too swollen for them to safely cross. “To our minds this was a far more trying time than when Moses led the children of Israel across the Red Sea, for unlike them, we had no inspired leader to call on the Lord to part the waters for us,” recalled J. H. Greenwood, son of Garrison, one of the settler leaders. Instead the Parkers and their neighbors huddled on the western bank along with hundreds of other colonists, hungry, wet, desperate, and fearful they would be trapped. The exodus was known as the Runaway Scrape.
Then the Lord seemed to intervene. On April 21, Houston’s volunteer army vanquished Santa Anna’s forces at San Jacinto, some 120 miles to the south. Like Israelites miraculously delivered from a vengeful Pharaoh, the Parkers and their neighbors rejoiced, then rushed home and set about hurriedly planting their summer corn crop. There were steady reports and rumors that Indians were preparing to attack. Daniel Parker claimed that an Indian named Jinie Jim warned him that some five hundred warriors, Caddos and other tribes, were gathering on the Trinity River near the Cross Timbers and planning to destroy Parker’s Fort and then move on to other settlements “for the purpose of Killing the white people.” Sam Houston himself expressed misgivings about the vulnerable location of the Parker stockade. But the planting season could not wait: corn had to be sown now or else the Parkers risked a disastrous winter ahead. In any event the danger seemed to have passed, and James Parker disbanded his small Ranger company. The Parkers and their neighbors still carried their aging single-shot rifles when they went to work the fields, but the main gate of the stockade was left open so that the settlers could move in and out easily while catching up on their farmwork. There was, they believed, nothing to fear.
And so it was a shock on the morning of May 19, while James Parker, his son-in-law Luther Plummer, and most of the other men were out working fields a mile or more away, that a large band of Indians on horseback appeared before the fort waving a soiled white flag. There were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of young warriors—some of the settlers’ accounts would later claim as many as eight hundred. Benjamin Parker approached the group unarmed and asked what they wanted. He came back to tell his brother Silas that the Indians were demanding a steer for meat and directions to a waterhole. Benjamin feared these requests were just a pretext, but he insisted on going back out again in hope of preventing an attack or at least buying time. Silas pleaded with him not to go, but Benjamin felt he had no choice. Silas ran inside to get his ammunition pouch while Benjamin slowly strode back to the Indians. It was a noble but fatal gesture. The warriors surrounded him, clubbed him senseless, and stuck his lifeless body repeatedly with lances. Then they let out a piercing cry, with “voices that seemed to reach the very skies,” and rushed the fort.
Everything after that was panic and noise and blood and pandemonium. The Indians sprinted for the open gate, while the settlers, mostly women and children, fled wildly. Silas Parker got off one shot before the Indians engulfed him, pounded his head to a wet crimson pulp, and ripped off his scalp with a butcher knife. They killed Samuel Frost and his teenage son Robert inside the fort, then seized Elder John in front of his wife, Sally, shattered his skull with hatchets, and hacked off his scalp and his genitals, then pinned Sally to the ground with a lance through her chest, stripped off her clothes, and left her writhing. Rachel Plummer, bundling eighteen-month-old James Pratt in her arms, tried to flee, but she was cut off by the raiders, knocked down by an Indian wielding one of the farm’s hoes, and beaten over the head until she stopped screaming and let go of the boy. She was forced to remain on the ground, silent, dazed, swollen, and bleeding, burning with fear, certain that the attackers were killing her little boy, until she saw him on a horse, held tight in the blunt arms of a warrior, crying out, “Mother, oh Mother!”
Some of the hysterical women and children made it to the fields. Sarah Parker Nixon, the other of James’s married daughters, reached her father first, followed by James’s wife, Martha, and their four younger children. James shepherded them across the river; at first he planned to hide them there and set out for the fort, but they pleaded with him not to leave them. Luther Plummer went looking for the other farmers to organize a rescue mission, while Sarah’s husband Lorenzo started immediately for the fort.
The Indians commenced to plunder the stockade. They slashed open mattresses and scattered the feathers. They tore open James’s books and smashed his medicine bottles. Lucy Parker, Silas’s wife, tried to flee with her four small children. She ran into Lorenzo Nixon, but before he could lead her and the children to safety, Indians surrounded all of them and marched them back to the fort. The Indians forced Lucy to help load her two oldest children behind mounted warriors, and they were in the process of taking the younger two, Silas junior and Orlena, when David Faulkenberry, a lone farmer armed with a single-shot rifle, emerged from the woods and trained his weapon on the attackers. Faulkenberry gathered Lucy, her two young ones, and Nixon behind him and forced the Indians to retreat. But no one could help the other captives.
Rachel Plummer, covered in blood and bruises, was dragged by her long red hair to the back of an Indian pony and forced to climb on. She saw the Indians shove her young aunt, Elizabeth Kellogg, onto another pony and watched as a warrior triumphantly waved a handful of bloody scalps; the only one she recognized was the long gray hair of her beloved grandfather, Elder John.
The raiders mounted up and rode away with a flourish, lancing any cattle they came across in a final gesture of vandalism and contempt. They had killed five people and taken five more captive without a single casualty of their own, and now they rode deep into the night, weaving their way through the heavy forested bottomlands with their prisoners: two young women—Rachel Plummer and Elizabeth Kellogg—Rachel’s toddler son, James Pratt, and her eight-year-old nephew, John. And on another mount, alone and terrified after watching her father, her uncle, and her grandfather all killed before her eyes, and held tight by her Indian captor, the late Silas Parker’s oldest child and the late Elder John Parker’s forty-ninth grandchild: nine-year-old Cynthia Ann.