PA R K E R C O U N T Y T O D AY
SEPTEMBER 2015
Religious differences and land figured into
the Parkers’ move from Crawford County, Illinois
to the freedom and bounty of the Texas frontier.
Elder John’s sons, James W. (Rachel’s father) and
Silas secured land in the Robertson Colony, along
with James W.’s son-in-law, Luther Thomas Martin
Plummer (Rachel’s husband). Each received a grant
of 4,600 acres. The family counted their blessings
and celebrated this land in faraway Texas, never
imagining that taking possession of it would lead to
death and cruel captivity for many of the family.
On that fateful day, May 19, 1836, the fog had
lifted, chased away by bright sunshine that seemed
to promise a fine, clear day for the subsistence
farmers of Fort Parker. Ten men, including Rachel’s
father, and a boy had already left for the fields,
leaving the large main gates opened wide on their
hinges. The Parkers and others living in or near the
fort were at ease in their new home, and the former
vigilance of their early days there had lapsed into
unwarranted comfort.
Around 9 o’clock, a vague sense of unease fell
upon the inhabitants of the stockade. People were
stirring about, the fires beneath the cast iron tubs
spat and spewed smoke that wafted across the enclosed common area and slipped over the 12-foothigh cedar-post walls. Then came the piercing call:
“Indians! Indians!” Hundreds of them, mostly Comanches and Kiowas, were gathered before the fort,
about 200 yards out. Immediately the fort became
a beehive of activity with people running this way
and that, grabbing up little children playing in the
sandy dirt, arming themselves against an unspeakable possibility.
Seventeen-year-old Rachel picked up her
18-month-old son, James Pratt, and thought about
escaping out the back of the fort as other women
and children were doing. But she hesitated. “I was
in the act of going to my father [in the fields], but
I knew I was not able to take my little son,” the
expecting mother would write later in her narrative
of the raid and her captivity. The Indians seemed
just to appear: “One minute the fields were clear,
and the next moment, more Indians than I dreamed
possible were in front of the fort,” Rachel wrote.
T wo of the Indians, one carrying a white flag,
separated from the mass of warriors and squaws
and approached the gates. With many workers in fields a mile distant, only six men manned
the ill-protected fort. Benjamin Parker, Rachel’s
uncle, walked out to talk to the painted emissaries,
returned to say he believed the party would attack
and was killed and stabbed repeatedly with lances
when he went out a second time to the Indians. The
Comanches easily overran the fort, killing her uncle
Silas (Cynthia Ann Parker’s father) and three others.
Terrorized, Rachel finally snatched up her son
and ran through a cacophony of war hoops and
blood-curdling screams, desperate to make the rear
gate. “I tried to make my escape, but alas, alas, it
was too late as a party of Indians had got ahead of
me. Oh, how vain were my feeble efforts to try to
run to save myself and little James Pratt,” Rachel
wrote.
As the young mother scrabbled about before the
hostiles, a “large Indian” picked up a hoe from the
ground and struck her down. The raiders wrenched
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LMT Plummer
James Pratt from her arms and one of the Indians dragged halfconscious Rachel by her long hair back toward the fort. Regaining
her wits she screamed and saw Indian women beating and mutilating Samuel Frost and his son Robert’s lifeless corpses. Spying
her, the women refocused their frenzied brutality and clubbed and
whipped Rachel into motionlessness. Her assailants bound her
hands behind her and tied her feet together.
Rachel wiggled into a sitting position and with woozy vision
surveyed the utter chaos erupting inside the fort. The plunderers’ shrill cries and yelps were deafening, and the air filled with
clouds of feathers ripped from the settlers’ bedding. Some of the
marauders rode their horses through the livestock pens, launching
a multidirectional stampede of frantic, darting animals into the
compound. Her eyes searched the bewildering scene for her son.
Debauchery, bloody ecstasy, and then, tiny James Pratt Plummer
atop a mustang in the arms of one of the invaders, crying at his
lungs’ limits for his mother, for a familiar, unpainted face. Instinctively, Rachel cried out and once again felt the lash upon her face.
Before noon, Rachel saw her aunt Elizabeth Kellogg brought in
with hands bound and thrown down beside her where her captors
clubbed her nearly senseless. Mounted warriors had overtaken her
and 78-year-old Elder John Parker and his wife about three-quarters of a mile from the fort. They’d stripped, murdered and scalped
Elder John and left his wife for dead. His scalp, striped with gray,
was among others Rachel saw dangling from the Indians’ accouterments. She heard children whimpering and looked up to see
cousins Cynthia Ann, 9, and John Richard Parker, 6, behind their
mounted captors. The sight focused her on the horror of things
to come; she knew she too would leave Fort Parker behind one
of the red-and-black-faced raiders. Once atop an Indian pony,
Rachel’s hands were retied in front of her and her feet were bound