Almost from the moment of her abduction, Cynthia Ann Parker’s family began telling and retelling the story, and shaping the facts to fit their own needs and understanding. The first narrators were her uncle James and the other men at Parker’s Fort who had failed to rescue her and the other captives. Their excuse was simple: they had been caught by surprise, and the vast numbers and brutality of the assailants had left them no time nor means to respond. Were there, in reality, eight Indians or, as some of the witnesses claimed, eight hundred? We will never know.
James Parker claimed he had grabbed his long gun and started immediately for the stockade, only to be intercepted by his fleeing wife, Martha, and their children. Fellow farmer George Dwight, who had also fled the fort, told him that everyone there had either been killed or taken prisoner. At that point, James said, he abandoned his rescue plans and gathered the terrified survivors; he led them up the Navasota River, retracing their steps by walking backwards so that the Indians couldn’t track them along the sandy riverbank. Six adults—including Martha, who was eight months pregnant—and twelve children set off under cover of darkness for the safety of Tinnin’s settlement some forty miles to the east. They had no horses, food, blankets, or spare clothing. Most had no shoes. The grown-ups carried the smaller children on their backs. “We were in the howling wilderness, barefooted and bare-headed,” James would write, “a savage and relentless foe on the one hand; on the other, a traceless and uninhabited country literally covered with venomous reptiles and ravenous beasts.”
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 Indians 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.
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 recall. 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.”
Recent historians have disagreed. Joaquin Rivaya-Martínez, a Texas State University scholar, collected and studied archival documents, ethnographic field studies, and other data on 350 kidnapped women, both Anglos and Mexicans, and found clear indications of sexual abuse in only nine cases. He conceded the evidence is spotty: those who recorded the contemporary accounts of these women may have omitted sexual episodes to protect the reputations of the victims, and many of the younger women may well have become the wives or concubines of their captors. The line between rape and coerced marriage was fuzzy, Rivaya-Martínez concluded. Still, he did not uncover any evidence suggesting that Comanches seized women for the explicit purpose of sexual gratification. Indeed, on the warpath, men would have shunned sex so as not to dilute their puha, or medicine.
Once removed from the battlefield, however, the men had no such fear. A captive woman could be considered the common property of an entire war party or of the man who captured her. Those like Rachel who were destined to be kept as slaves might be treated well enough to survive. Others were sexually violated and left to die. Geoffrey and Susan Michno, who compiled accounts of captives throughout the Great Plains, reported that of eighty-three women ages thirteen or older whose stories they studied, forty-eight were almost certainly raped and another twenty-nine probably were. “The sweeping generalizations by Dodge and Fehrenbach are overstatements—but only slightly,” they write.
No matter what the numbers, it only took a few incidents of rape to terrorize Texas settlers and feed the legend of Indian rapacity and the notion that to be captured by Comanches was the classic Fate Worse than Death. Those women who returned to the white world were often closely scrutinized to see if their purity and moral standing had been compromised. Those who admitted they had submitted to the sexual demands of their captors in order to remain alive could find themselves shunned by husbands, friends, and relatives.
The more benign experience seemed to be that of abducted boys and girls between the ages of six and twelve. A team of modern psychologists could not have drawn up a more thorough method for absorbing a young person into the tribe. After being brutalized by his or her immediate captors and spirited north on a harrowing journey, the captive would be turned over to a family that oftentimes had lost a child of its own and treated the new addition with kindness and affection. Within a matter of months the young person would lose the ability to speak English, and memories of parents and families faded or were crowded out altogether by many kindnesses and new adventures.
* * *
COMANCHE ORAL TRADITION— handed down, buffed, and embellished over five generations—claims that nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker was taken to a village somewhere across the Red River, where she was adopted by a childless couple, bathed in a creek to wash off the blood, dirt, and fear, and taken into their home. Peta Nocona, the young warrior who was part of the raiding party at Parker’s Fort, made a claim on her life and her labor; within a few years he would make her one of his wives. But Cynthia Ann herself left no oral or written account of her life as a Comanche. It’s possible to draw conclusions from her actions, but not from her words.
There was another young girl, Dot Babb’s sister Bianca, who was ten when she was abducted during the raid on her family farm, and her experience most likely closely paralleled that of Cynthia Ann. Bianca produced an unpublished memoir that is the only first-person Comanche captivity narrative by a young girl. Just as Cynthia Ann watched Indians kill her father, uncle, and grandfather, Bianca watched Indians shoot her mother in the back with an arrow, plunge a lance through her throat, and scalp her as she lay dying. After the raiders dragged a terrified Bianca from the farmhouse, she grabbed hold of a tree trunk and refused to let go even after an Indian pulled a long knife from his belt and threatened to cut her hands off. After several feints with the knife, he laughed and put it away, then “jerked me so hard that the rough bark on the post tore the flesh from the inside of my hands.” Still, she pledged to herself not to cry—and the warrior who grabbed her told her later that if she had cried, he would have killed her on the spot. He threw her on the back of his horse and rode off with a band of raiders and two other captives: her older brother Dot, then fourteen, and Sarah Luster, a visitor to the house.
Mrs. Luster escaped one evening with Dot’s help, after which the warriors struck him in the chest with a pistol. Dot refused to cry or beg for mercy. Next, they tied him to a tree and placed a ring of dead grass, leaves, and limbs around him and set them on fire. Still, he did not flinch. A terrified Bianca began to laugh hysterically, causing Dot to laugh as well. The warriors then aimed their bows and arrows at him. But their leader told them to put down their weapons. “They thought he was brave enough to make a good warrior, and decided not to kill him,” Bianca recalled.
After a harrowing ten-day ride to the heart of Comancheria, Bianca was taken to a Comanche village. She was immediately surrounded by curious men, women, and children, most of whom had never seen a white girl before. With her fists and feet she fought off the friendly mob that pulled at her. The children stroked her long blonde hair. Even the camp’s vast population of dogs “seemed to be as anxious to make my acquaintance.” Her captor turned her over to his sister, Tekwashana, a childless young widow whose husband had been killed by whites. Tekwashana made Bianca a bed of dry grass, blankets, and buffalo robes on the floor of her teepee. On cold nights Tekwashana would stand Bianca in front of the fire and turn her around slowly until she was warm, then wrap her in a buffalo robe. Tekwashana dressed her in bracelets, earrings, and a headdress and taught her how to ride a horse, but also assigned her to fetch water, gather wood, and help move camp. “She was always very thoughtful of me and seemed to care as much for me as if I was her very own child,” Bianca would recall.
That first night the Indians held a feast in her honor. They had a rare meal of bread and coffee with sugar. From the start, “I was made to know that my life was to be a regular Indian life,” she wrote. “… Children came to play with me and tried to make me welcome into their kind of life.” They named her Tijana—“Texas” in Comanche—although her nickname was “Smell Bad When You Walk” because she had soiled her clothing when she was first captured.
Tekwashana taught Bianca how to swim by letting go of her in the deepest part of the river. She made her adopted daughter a calico dress from a large piece of cloth without using a stitch; she pierced Bianca’s ears with a red-hot needle, then adorned her in silver earrings with long silver chains that hung down to her shoulders. Mother and daughter would jump into the river, take off their dresses and rub them together, wring them out, and spread them on the bushes to dry while playing in the water.
Bianca’s Comanches were not the grim warriors and harsh taskmasters of Rachel Plummer’s harrowing narrative but simple people “of a jovial, happy disposition, always friendly and playing some kind of joke on the other fellow.” Their children must have been exceptionally good, she wrote, because “in all the time I was with them I do not remember of seeing them correct or punish one.”
“Every day,” according to Bianca Babb, “seemed to be a holiday.”
Seven months after Bianca was taken, a white scout named J. J. Sturm came to her village seeking to ransom her. Bianca, who could still recall her old life in Texas, told a stunned Tekwashana that she wanted to go back home with Sturm. Her adoptive mother “hung her head and would not talk to me.”
That night Bianca slept outside the teepee on the side she knew Tekwashana slept near. After Bianca fell asleep, however, Tekwashana carried her inside. Tekwashana gathered a pile of dried meat and water jugs and hatched a plan to flee with Bianca and stay away until Sturm gave up and left. An exhausted Bianca acquiesced. She quickly grew so tired that Tekwashana carried her on her back, but Sturm tracked them down the next day, put Bianca on the back of his horse, and rode off, leaving a brokenhearted Tekwashana to trail behind on foot.
Bianca Babb, who lived to be ninety-three, never saw her Comanche mother again.
