AUGUST 2015
PA R K E R C O U N T Y T O D AY
But the tomahawk-wielding brave with his face painted murderous red and black had insisted … strenuously.
Unreal. Impossible. Yet her disbelieving eyes followed
her children’s bodies across the prairie until at last they
were swallowed up by the dark oak woods and disappeared from the white world.
Taken along with Cynthia Ann and John Richard
Parker that day were Elizabeth Duty Kellogg and Rachel
Parker Plummer and her 18—month-old son, James Pratt
Plummer. Rachel, Cynthia Ann’s cousin, was carrying a
second child.
The attack on Fort Parker near present-day Groesbeck
took place during an earlier wave of white settlement,
in 1836, a little over two months after Texas wrested
independence from Mexico to become a republic.
Several hundred Indians, mainly Comanches and Kiowas,
appeared without warning at the front of the fort. One of
them waved a white flag, a gesture the handful of settlers
present at the fort saw as a ruse. The Indians made short
work of overrunning the fort, leaving its defenders on the
ground soaked in their own blood, mutilated and scalped.
No one knew it at the time, but Cynthia Ann Parker was
on her way to becoming the West’s most famous Indian
captive. Her tale of violent abduction galvanized white
settlers along the frontier, and then as the years wore on
demoralized them.
“The first days of her capture were terrifying,” wrote
Susan Michno in A Fate Worse Than Death: Indian
Captivities in the West, 1832-1885. “She had seen her
relatives butchered, and she was beaten and abused. Not
yet ten years old, she may not have been raped, but was
stripped of her clothes, and witnessed the rape of her
cousin Rachel [Plummer], and Rachel’s Aunt Elizabeth
22
Arial view of Fort Parker
[Kellogg]. Captives were chattel property and their captors
could do with them as they pleased. They might be
tortured and killed, gang-raped or protected by the captor,
depending on individual whim.”
Once at the Indian camp, captives were generally
clubbed or lashed by others of the tribe or band, a sort
of welcome to hell greeting — a gauntlet run. Captives
became slaves responsible for maintaining their c aptors’
lodges, which was backbreaking, thankless work. As the
days and months passed, the brutal monotony of servitude
set in and many captives settled into their new reality,
cooperating to survive. Cynthia Ann Parker seems to have
adopted this mindset thoroughly — until something inside
her recalibrated and she did the unthinkable: she assimilated.
Five days after the raid, the captives were split up,
with Cynthia Ann going with a Tenowish Comanche
couple who raised her as their own. Day by day her link
to the white world weakened as her adoptive parents
schooled her in all things Comanche, all the rudimentary
and nuanced mores of Comanche culture and custom.
She remained among her new tribe 25 years, turning
down every opportunity to return to her white family. But
in the end, she did return.
Within a half-dozen years all other captives taken from
Fort Parker on May 19, 1836, had been ransomed and
returned to their families. Cynthia Ann, or “Naduah,” as
she’d come to be called, remained disappeared, though
sightings and reports of her whereabouts and intransigence were relatively common and baffling to her anxious
family.
Reportedly*, in the mid-1840s, her little brother
John, who’d been taken with her and in time had been