Parker County Today August 2015 | Page 24

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