THERE IS HISTORY that is based on hard, documented fact; history that is colored with rumor, speculation, or falsehood; and history that exists in what might be termed the hinterlands of the imagination. The latter describes many of the nineteenth-century accounts of the captivity of Cynthia Ann Parker, the legendary “White Squaw” who chose the red man over the white man and a life of unwashed savagery over the comforts of “civilization.” Most are informed by a sort of bewildered disbelief that anyone, but especially a woman, could possibly want to do that. The result, as in this 1893 telling by a former federal Indian agent, is often a weirdly incongruous attempt to graft European romantic ideals on to Stone Age culture:
As the years rolled by, Cynthia Ann developed the charms of captivating womanhood, and the heart of more than one dusky warrior was pierced by the Ulyssean darts of her laughing eyes and the ripple of her silvery voice, and laid at her feet the trophy of the chase.¹
There is plenty of literature like this, and much of it amounts to a denial that there was any such thing as Indian culture. It’s all Tristan and Isolde. Cynthia Ann is seen falling in love, wandering through fragrant, flower-strewn fields, discussing the prospects of connubial bliss with her warrior swain, and so forth. (In another completely made-up “historical” account that appeared in many places, her younger brother and fellow captive, John Parker, courts a “night-eyed” “Aztec” beauty, a captive herself, whiling away the idle hours in amorous talk. She later risks her own life to nurse him through smallpox, and they ride off into the sunset together.)² Other versions of her life assumed the reverse: a harsh reality in which Cynthia Ann was suffering terrible hardship and “degradation.” But in this case it was happening entirely against her will. The idea, expressed in delicate Victorian code, of course, was that she was forced to have sex with greasy, dark-skinned, subhuman Indians because she could not possibly have chosen to do so on her own. “No situation can be depicted to our minds,” sighed the Clarksville Northern Standard in northeast Texas, “replete with half the horrors of that unfortunate young lady’s.”³
Both approaches grew out of the same fundamental problem: No one really knew what happened to her, and no one ever knew what she thought. People were thus free to indulge their prejudices. Though she became, in lore, legend, and history, the most famous captive of her era, the fact was that, at the age of nine, she had disappeared without a trace into the incomprehensible vastness of the Great Plains. Most captives were either killed or ransomed within a few months or years. The White Squaw stayed out twenty-four years, enough time to forget almost everything she had once known, including her native language, to marry and have three children and live the full, complex, and highly specialized life of a Plains Indian. She was seen twice, and only briefly: The first sighting happened ten years after her capture; the second, five years after that. Almost every other moment of that time is, in conventional historical terms, completely opaque. Plains Indians did not write letters or journals or record their legal proceedings, or even keep copies of treaties—history meant nothing to them.
That does not mean, however, that she has gone entirely into legend. Understanding her life requires a bit of digging about in the Indian affairs of the middle century, some historical sleuthing with the benefit of one hundred sixty years of hindsight. It is possible to ascertain which Comanche bands she lived with, where those bands lived, when and where epidemics of white man’s diseases struck them, when they won or lost battles, the identity of her husband and the names and approximate birth dates of her three children.
Perhaps most important, we know the general behavior of the tribe toward what might be called a “loved captive.” To victims of Comanche brutality, it was almost impossible to believe that such a phenomenon existed. Yet it did, and it was not uncommon. The infertile Comanche women and statistically death-prone Comanche men were undiscriminating in whom they invited into the tribe. Their captives included Mexicans, Spanish, members of many other tribes (including hated foes like the Utes and Apaches), whites of all descriptions, and slave children. Their bloodline, as twentieth-century studies would show, was extremely impure compared to other tribes. The ones they adopted were usually prepubescent children. Adult women were either killed or, like Rachel Plummer, destined for hard lives as slaves, sexual and otherwise. Some, like Matilda Lockhart, were terribly abused. Loved captives were something entirely different. They were embraced and cherished and treated as full family members. This was Cynthia Ann.
Fortunately, in view of Cynthia Ann’s resonating silence on the subject, there exist several parallel accounts. The best comes from Bianca “Banc” Babb, taken captive by Comanches at the age of ten in September 1866 in Decatur (northwest of present-day Dallas), and ransomed seven months later. She was taken by the same band—Nokonis—that took the Parker captives. Her written chronicle remains the only first-person narrative of a girl’s captive time with a southern plains tribe.⁴ There are great similarities with the captivity of Cynthia Ann Parker, starting with the horrific circumstances under which Banc was taken. Her mother was stabbed four times with a butcher knife while Banc held her hand.⁵ Then the little girl watched as her mother was shot through the lungs with an arrow and scalped while still alive. (She was later found with her blood-smeared baby daughter, who was trying to nurse at her dying mother’s breast.)⁶ Banc also watched as Sarah Luster, a beautiful twenty-six-year-old who was captured with her, became, in Banc’s brother’s words, “the helpless victim of unspeakable violation, humiliation, and involuntary debasement.”⁷
Like the Parker captives, Banc, her brother, and Mrs. Luster were strapped behind Indians on horses and taken on a furious ride north. They had little food and were not allowed to dismount their horses. At one point Banc was given a chunk of bloody meat cut from a cow that wolves had killed. She ate it, and liked it. She lost control of her bowels while on the back of the horse, and thus acquired her unfortunate Indian name: “Smells Bad When You Walk.” After four days of chafe and dire thirst and muscle ache and blistering sunburn, they arrived at the Indian village. Here the Comanche with whom she had ridden gave Banc to his sister, whose husband had been killed the morning before the raid on the Babb house. The widow had no children of her own.⁸
And then everything changed. Banc was taken into a close-knit family group that consisted of thirty-five people who camped together in eight buffalo-hide tipis. She and her Comanche mother, Tekwashana, shared a tipi. According to Banc’s memoir:
This woman was always good to me, that is she never scolded me, and seldom ever corrected me. . . . Our bed consisted of a pile of dead grass, with blankets and dressed buffalo robes spread over the grass. On cold winter nights my Squaw Mother would have me stand before the fire, turning [me] round occasionally, so I could get good and warm, then she would wrap me up in a buffalo robe and lay me on the bed over near the outer edge, next to the tentwall and tuck me in good and warm. . . . She . . . seemed to care as much for me as if I were her very own child.⁹
The world Banc describes sometimes sounds like a child’s paradise. Indeed, she recalled that “every day seemed to be a holiday.” She played happily with other children. She loved the informality of meals that usually involved standing around a boiling kettle and spearing meat with skewers. She liked the taste of the meat, though she said it took a long time to chew. Tekwashana taught her to swim, pierced her ears, and gave her long silver earrings with silver chains and brass bracelets for her arms. The Comanche women mixed buffalo tallow and charcoal and rubbed it into her bright blond hair to make it dark. She loved the war dances. She learned the language quickly and so well that, after only seven months of captivity (which she believed was two years), it was hard for her to “get my tongue twisted back so I could talk English again to my folk and my friends.”¹⁰ She had two dresses, and neither was buckskin: One was made of calico, and one made of blue-and-white-striped bed ticking.
Banc also describes hardship and days that were not like holidays at all. Her captors were, after all, nomadic hunter-gatherers; life was at best uncertain. There was not always enough food to eat. Sometimes her family group would get only small rations of dried meat; on other occasions they would not give her any and she sometimes went two days without food. “When our supply of dried meat was gone we lived on boiled corn,” she wrote, “and when that was exhausted and everybody hungry, they would kill a fat horse or mule and then we would have a feast as long as that lasted.” She said her family owned three hundred horses, which suggests that they detested horse meat and ate it only as a last resort. Or perhaps they detested the idea of eating such a useful and tradeable commodity. The band moved its camp every three weeks—typical of nomads who required a good deal of horse pasturage—which meant hard work for everyone, including Banc. She carried water, gathered wood, and packed the horses and mules on moving days, and helped see to all the logistics of the move, including the care of the dogs. At one point she violated a taboo by passing in front of the men’s tipis while fetching water. In punishment, an old woman set her dogs on her. Later that same woman attacked her with an ax, managing instead to kill a young Indian girl who happened to intervene. The woman, Banc noted, was summarily executed.
In April 1867, Banc was ransomed for $333. That night a heartbroken Tekwashana shut her out of the tent. Later she relented and convinced Banc to try to escape with her, carrying the girl on her back. This was extreme behavior, punishable by violence, and clear evidence of how much Tekwashana loved her adopted daughter. The two were tracked down and caught the next day. Banc was soon returned to her family. At their reunion, she realized that she had forgotten how to speak English.
Another account, less complete but similar in many ways, came from a girl who lived in central Texas. One of the bloodiest raids ever carried out by Comanches took place in Legion Valley, near modern-day Llano, Texas, in 1868. They took seven captives but killed five of them in the first few days—including a baby and a three-year-old—leaving only lovely, long-haired Malinda Ann “Minnie” Caudle, eight, and a boy named Temple Friend, seven. Minnie was immediately adopted by a fat Comanche woman, with whom she rode back to the Indian camp. Her new mother slept with her to keep her warm and tried to shelter her from the events of the first night, when Minnie’s two aunts were raped and tortured as they wept and prayed aloud.¹¹ The next day her captors decided the two aunts were too much trouble. When they seized them and killed them, Minnie’s Comanche mother threw a blanket over her head so she would not have to watch.¹² Like Banc Babb, Minnie Caudle was treated with great kindness. Her new mother told her stories by the fire. The Comanche women would not let the Indian men harm her. They cooked meat for her the way she liked it, and when they passed salt licks they made sure to get some salt to season her food. They dressed her in buckskin and greased her body with tallow to keep her dry in rain and snow.¹³ Like Banc, too, Minnie was held captive half a year, then ransomed and returned. Her story survived in one published interview and in later interviews with her descendants.¹⁴
Thus two experiences that were very likely similar, except for the ransoming and return, to Cynthia Ann Parker’s. One can only speculate. As long as both of them lived, Banc and Minnie defended the Comanche tribe. Minnie Caudle “would not hear a word against the Indians,” according to her great-granddaughter. Her great-grandson said, “She always took up for the Indians. She said they were good people in their way. When they got kicked around, they fought back.”¹⁵ This is asserted against the brute facts of her own experience, which involved watching her captors rape and kill five members of her family. Banc Babb, against all reason and memory, felt the same way. In 1897 she applied for official adoption into the Comanche tribe. Both girls had seen something in the primitive, low-barbarian Comanches that almost no one else had, not even people like Rachel Plummer with long experience of tribal life. Banc’s brother Dot Babb described it as “bonds of affection almost as sacred as family ties. Their kindnesses to me had been lavish and unvarying, and my friendship and attachment in return were deep and sincere.”¹⁶ The children all had the sense that, at the core of these most notorious and brutal killers, there existed a deep and abiding tenderness. Perhaps that should be obvious, since they were, after all, human beings. But it was absolutely not obvious to white settlers on the western frontier in the mid-nineteenth century.
- • •
In April 1846 an Indian agent from Texas named Leonard H. Williams was dispatched by the U.S. Indian Commissioners to find a Comanche headman named Pah-hah-yuco. This was not just any paraibo. Pah-hah-yuco was, along with the cunning, diminutive Mopechucope (Old Owl), the greatest of the Penateka peace chiefs.¹⁷ In 1843 he had intervened to stop the torture and killing that had been planned for three Texas commissioners who had been sent to make amends for the Council House massacre. Most of his tribe had supported the idea of burning the white men. Pah-hah-yuco had that sort of power. He was a large, portly man, weighed more than two hundred pounds, had several wives, and what one observer described as “a pleasing expression of countenance, full of good humor and joviality.”¹⁸ His name has been translated as “The Amorous Man,” but one suspects a more priapic meaning in the Comanche original.¹⁹ Colonel Williams, whose expedition consisted of eleven men, was instructed to invite the chief to treaty talks, the first ever with the United States, of which Texas had just become part. He was also told to find out if there were any captives in the camp, and to purchase them if he could.
Williams found Pah-hah-yuco on the Washita River, in what is now Oklahoma, probably not far from where it flows into the Red River, about seventy-five miles north of modern-day Dallas. It is unclear how Williams found the village in the great, wild beyond of the unsurveyed Indian territories, but he undoubtedly used Indian guides who were friendly with Comanches, very likely Delawares or Wichitas. It must have been a heart-pounding, adrenaline-pumping moment when his small band first rode, unannounced, into the huge Comanche village with its lodges and campfires and racks of drying buffalo meat that snaked for miles along the banks of the river. The arrival of the Williams party created an immediate uproar in the camp. Some of the younger warriors plotted immediately to kill them. Luckily, Williams found out about this from a Mexican boy captive, and claimed the protection of Pah-hah-yuco, who, according to Williams, “with difficulty succeeded in pacifying and restraining his men.”²⁰
Having narrowly escaped assassination, Williams now discovered, to his astonishment, that the Indian village contained the blue-eyed, light-haired Cynthia Ann Parker, the last unaccounted-for victim of the infamous massacre at Parker’s Fort, the little blond girl who never returned. It is unclear exactly how he learned of this, because she certainly did not tell him, and because being rescued from her grim and horrible fate was entirely the white man’s idea and not hers. She was nineteen. Colonel Williams had met her before, having been acquainted with the Parker family in their early days in Texas. Such was her notoriety, even then, that Williams immediately dispatched a runner with the news back to the governor’s office in Austin.
Then Williams set about trying to purchase her from the Indians. Buying and selling captives was normal enough commerce in those days. It had been a source of profit to the Comanches since the earliest days of their ascendancy on horseback. They had done a brisk trade in Apache and Mexican captives, often using the elaborately tattooed Wichitas of north-central Texas as brokers. The captives often ended up, transshipped like bales of cotton, in Louisiana markets. Nowadays the business seemed to be centered in various Red River depots, where mercenary traders and other louche types from the outer borderlands with few scruples ran a sort of human arbitrage business, ransoming captives from the Indians then reselling them to their families at a profit. It was a highly speculative business, and involved a good deal of lying and misrepresentation. There were captives whose “saviors” turned out to be the worst sort of swindlers.
But, as Williams soon discovered, this case was different. The Indians simply would not negotiate. In one account, he offered “12 mules and 2 mule loads of merchandise” for her, a princely sum for a single hostage. That was refused by the Indians who, according to a newspaper story, “say they will die rather than give her up.”²¹ Another had him offering “a large amount of goods and $400 to $500 in cash.”²² Still, the Indians refused. There were several reported versions of Cynthia Ann’s behavior. In one, she ran off and hid to avoid Williams and the others. In another, she “wept incessantly,” presumably at the thought of being returned. In a third version, Colonel Williams was granted permission to speak to her. She approached him, then sat down under a tree and stared in front of her, refusing to speak or even to indicate whether she understood him. In James T. DeShields’s nineteenth-century telling, almost certainly embellished for the tender sensibilities of his readers: “the anxiety of her mind was betrayed by the perceptible quiver of her lips, showing that she was not insensible to the common feelings of humanity.”²³
A letter written four months later from commissioners Pierce Butler and M. G. Lewis to the commissioner of Indian affairs in Washington cleared up the mystery. They suggested that the problem was not with Pah-hah-yuco or with the other headmen, who were more than willing to sell her for the right price. It was rather that “The young woman is claimed by one of the Comanches as his wife. From the influence of her alleged husband, or from her own inclination, she is unwilling to leave the people with whom she associates.”²⁴ This was love, apparently, as difficult as that was for the white world to swallow. Either way, she wasn’t going anywhere, for any amount of money. On the mercenary frontier, this was in itself shocking news.
- • •
At some point Cynthia Ann and Peta Nocona began living with the Penatekas, though the exact date will never be known. The Comanches responsible for the Parker’s Fort raid were allegedly Nokonis. But the evidence for this is sketchy at best, as was the taibos’ general understanding of Indian bands. They may well have been Penatekas. Or even Tennawish, a lesser band that camped, hunted, and raided with the Penatekas. Or even a combination of bands. One report had Cynthia Ann with the Yamaparikas from the distant north, which was almost certainly not true. But the band distinction is important. Based on the available evidence, the band Cynthia Ann was associated with throughout most of the 1840s were Penatekas: Pah-hah-yuco’s southern Comanches.
That was bad luck. However she landed with them, it meant that she was thrown into the middle of a social and cultural disaster of epic proportions. To use a later historical parallel, it would have been like being adopted into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1932. There was not much future in it. She thus became the helpless victim of huge, colliding historical forces utterly beyond her control. What happened to the Penatekas in the 1840s destroyed them as a coherent social organization. They did not go down quickly and they did not go down without a fight—in their death throes they were in some ways more lethal than ever, particularly in their Mexican raids—but they never recovered. Much of what was left of them, starving and demoralized, limped on to a tiny reservation in 1855, despised even by other Comanches.
Only ten years before, such a thing would have been unimaginable. At the moment of the raid on Parker’s Fort, the moment when a weeping Lucy Parker placed her terrified daughter on the rear flank of a Comanche mustang, the Comanches, and the Penatekas in particular, had been at the peak of their historical power and influence. They had defeated the Europeans, cowed the Mexicans, and had so thoroughly mastered the far southern plains that they were no longer threatened by other tribes. They had enough enemies to keep them entertained and supplied with a surfeit of horseflesh. But none to really worry about. Their source of food and sustenance, the buffalo, roamed the plains in record numbers and still ranged into every corner of Comancheria. The tribe’s low birth rates virtually guaranteed that their nomadic life following buffalo herds was infinitely sustainable. Their world was thus suspended in what seemed to be a perfect equilibrium, a balance of earth and wind and sun and sky that would endure forever. An empire under the bright summer moon. For those who witnessed the change at a very intimate and personal level, including Cynthia Ann and her husband, the speed with which that ideal world was dismantled must have seemed scarcely believable. She herself, the daughter of pioneers who were hammering violently at the age-old Comanche barrier that had defeated all other comers, now adopted into a culture that was beginning to die, was the emblem of the change.
Somehow she and her husband, Peta Nocona, survived the cataclysm. As nomads, they moved constantly. One imagines her on one of these migrations, on horseback, moving slowly across the open grassy plain with hundreds of others, warriors in the vanguard, toward a wide, hazy horizon that would have looked to white men like unalloyed emptiness. There were the long trains of heavily packed mules and horses and the ubiquitous Comanche dogs. There were horses dragging travois that carried the huge tent poles and piled buffalo hides and scored the earth as they went along—perfectly parallel lines drawn on the prairie, merging and vanishing into the pale-blue Texas sky. All trailed by the enormous horse remuda, the source of their wealth. It must have been something to behold. Cynthia Ann lived a hard life. Women did all of the brutally hard work, including most of the work that went into moving camp. They did it from dawn till dark, led brief difficult lives, and did not complain about it; they did everything except hunt and fight.
Her camp locations show just how far she roamed. Pah-hah-yuco’s camps were found in 1843 north of the Red River and south of modern-day Lawton, Oklahoma, on Cache Creek (the encampment was on a creek bank on the open prairie and stretched for half a mile).²⁵ In 1844 he was camped on the Salt Plains of present-day north-central Oklahoma, on the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River,²⁶ well north of the Washita, where Williams found him in 1846. In 1847 his band was spotted a hundred miles north of Austin, in rolling, lightly timbered prairie, camped in a village of one hundred fifty lodges,²⁷ and again that same year in a village in the limestone hills and mesas west of Austin. She was identified as being with the Tennawish band in 1847, who often camped with the Penateka (with whom Pah-hah-yuco was often associated), and for all practical purposes after 1845 may have been the same band. Those camps were in far west Texas on the headwaters of the Red River. Some accounts had her wearing “calico borne from the sacking of Linnville” and fleeing “with the discomfited Comanches up the Guadalupe and Colorado,”²⁸ suggesting she had been with Buffalo Hump on his raid. But these things cannot be proved.
Such migrations are in keeping with what we know of the Penateka. In the wake of the Council House Fight, they had moved their camps north, away from the extreme hostilities of the Lamar regime. In the middle of the decade, after changes in the political climate, they began to drift back southward to their usual ranges. Cynthia Ann went with them. She moved in a three-hundred-mile radius. Wherever she was, it was her bad luck to be with the Comanches whose villages and hunting grounds were first in line to be jostled by the impatient and grimly determined onrush of white civilization.
The Penatekas had borne the brunt of the Mirabeau Lamar years (1838–1841). They had been defeated at the Council House, at Plum Creek, and on the upper Colorado River. Two of those had been massacres. They had won military engagements, too, to be sure—including the San Saba and Bird’s Creek fights—and they had won plenty more against militia and ranging companies that were never recorded. But they must have had the sense that they had lost more than they had won, especially to a foe that seemed to have limitless resources, human and financial, at its disposal. Between 1836 and 1840 alone, the Penateka were thought to have lost a quarter of all their fighting men.²⁹
With such small numbers, it would normally take years to recover from such setbacks. But the Penatekas were already out of time. What was killing them steadily and surely was not the warlike policies of Lamar, as harsh as they were. Or even the catastrophic disappearance of game from their eastern ranges. The agent of destruction was the same one that had destroyed the majority of the population of almost every Indian tribe in the Americas, starting with the Aztecs: white man’s disease. This was not the first time that horse tribes had been hit by disease. Prior to 1820 it is thought that some thirty epidemics of varying scales moved through the Plains Indians: measles, malaria, whooping cough, and influenza, taking an unknown toll on their numbers.³⁰ But the Penatekas were hit harder than any other band or tribe on the plains. Their Mexican raiding had brought back smallpox in 1816 along with another horrifying and easily transmitted disease they had never seen before: syphilis. In 1839 smallpox had swept through them again, this time brought by Kiowas from the Mandan Indians on the Missouri River. Thousands had died.
They had no defense against this terrifying, invisible magic. While the Comanches’ abilities to treat simple medical conditions could be fairly sophisticated—they treated toothaches successfully with heated tree fungus, filled cavities by stuffing dried mushrooms in the hole; they made laxatives by boiling the cambium layer of the willow tree; they used mechanical tourniquets and even primitive surgery on gunshot wounds³¹—the best they could muster against these marauding spirits were prayers and incantations, magical markings on the body, and purification rites. One example of the latter was the presumed cure for smallpox: The sufferer took a sweat bath and then immersed himself in a cold stream, a treatment that often proved fatal.
Then, in 1849, came the most devastating blow of all: cholera. The disease had first appeared on earth in India’s Ganges River delta in the early nineteenth century. It broke out in Europe in 1830, crossed the ocean to America in 1832, and spread rapidly from there. It came west on the wagon trains with thousands of Forty-niners who were traveling to the gold fields of California. They traveled by old trails like the Santa Fe, but they cut new trails, too, including a route along the Canadian River, which passed through Oklahoma and Texas, and thus through the very heart of Comanche country. In 1849 alone three thousand pioneers traveled that route. They were a dirty, scurvy lot themselves, with hygiene scarcely better than the Indians, gold-crazed hilljacks from the poorer parts of the East and trans-Appalachia. They carried death with them (they had smallpox, too), and spread it in hundreds of Indian villages.
Cholera was not subtle; it killed fast and explosively. Its incubation period was from two hours to five days, which meant that, from the moment of infection, it could and often did kill a healthy adult in a matter of hours. The disease is marked by severe diarrhea and vomiting, followed by leg cramps, extreme dehydration, raging thirst, kidney failure, and death.³² It was a horrible way to die, and a horrible thing to watch. The disease was transmitted by the ingestion of fecal matter, either directly or in contaminated water or food. Imagine a village of five hundred primitive people with poor or nonexistent sanitary habits in which several hundred of them have violent, uncontrollable diarrhea. The water sources would soon be infected, and then everything else would be infected, too, creating a sort of microbial nightmare. Unable to understand what was causing it, the People had no chance. Because the Nermernuh viewed illness superstitiously, the sick were often left to die alone, layering one kind of horror on another. Grief-stricken families left their dying mothers or fathers or children to flee to the “safety” of another village, only to infect them, too. The disease ripped through the rest of the plains as well. Half of the entire Kiowa tribe perished; five decades later Kiowas remembered it as the most terrible experience in tribal memory.³³ Half of the southern Cheyennes died—an estimated two thousand had perished, a number that included entire bands. There was evidence of disease-driven suicide among Kiowas and Arapahoes.³⁴
No one knows how many thousands of Comanches died in the cholera epidemic of 1849. Some of the northern bands, including the Kotsoteka, were devastated by it as well. It is believed that half of the still-surviving Penateka died. That would mean that the band’s members dropped from eight thousand to two thousand in less than thirty years, though no hard estimate is possible. Most of the important camp headmen died in 1849. What started as gradual disintegration now looked like dissolution. Pah-hah-yuco managed to live through it, though he soon withdrew to far northern ranges. The band chose Buffalo Hump to succeed him, but the title lacked any meaning, since from now on the band had no common leader.³⁵ What was left of them found that the buffalo no longer came south to their ranges, and that much of the other game had disappeared, too. They had signed a few treaties, meanwhile, which of course did nothing to protect them. The agreements drew lines that the Indians could not cross, even to hunt, while white men sent surveying parties scurrying westward across those same imaginary lines into Indian lands. By the early 1850s many of the Penatekas were starving. In the words of one of their chiefs, Ketumseh,
Over this vast country, where for centuries our ancestors roamed in undisputed possession, free and happy, what have we left? The game, our main dependence, is killed and driven off, and we are forced into the most sterile and barren portions of it to starve. We see nothing but extermination left before us, and we await the result with stolid indifference. Give us a country we can call our own, where we may bury our people in quiet.³⁶
We can see this all now: the complete narrative of the Honey Eaters, the roots of their power, their long migrations south, their wars with Apaches and Mexicans, their rise to dominance on the southern plains, the curse of their proximity to the settlements, and what the cholera did to them. We can see their degradation, their decay, their suffering, the arc of their fall. But that is all hindsight.
No one on the frontier or in Houston or in Washington understood any of this at the time. There was little doubt that the Texans had won the fights at Council House and Plum Creek and the Colorado. But no one knew exactly what that meant or what portion of the Comanche tribe had been involved. A fierce and independent group numbering in the thousands with a remuda of fifteen thousand horses and camping in Palo Duro Canyon—the Quahadis—was beyond anything they knew or could guess at. Nor did the Texans have any idea how many Comanches died from cholera, or from the smallpox in 1839. They were invisible catastrophes; they would not be fully understood for decades. Comancheria still loomed before them, as dark, impenetrable, and lethal as ever. The last thing on anyone’s mind was mounting a large force of soldiers to ride far into the Northwest and try to conquer it. The taibos knew that much, anyway.
In this shadowy world of half knowledge and vague assessments, it was also impossible to see the principal side effect of Lamar’s war policy. Though he had driven the southern Comanches north of the Red River and thus produced a temporary peace, he had not changed the nature of the Comanches. The culture was based on war: Young men still had to fight and kill and return with horses. Instead of riding for the Texas frontier, which was now seen as a dangerous place, the Penateka looped to the west, down the old Comanche Trace, which opened into the Mexican states of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Chihuahua. There was little effective government here, the legacy of the long, slow decline of Spanish Imperial power and Mexico’s lack of will to hunt down marauding Indians in its northern provinces. Its eighty-thousand-man army stayed in the south, and was mainly used against the Mexican people. The only real threat were the armed vaqueros. The result was a sort of raider’s paradise.
And now Buffalo Hump and Santa Anna and other Penateka chiefs cut a wide arc of bloody terror through the eastern provinces of Mexico. They left a long trail of bloated and charred corpses and burned-out villages. They tortured hundreds or thousands to death, no one would ever know how many. They took captive children by the dozen and cattle and horses, and in the summer months people reported seeing this remarkable procession heading back north along the Trace, through current Fort Stockton, a long dusty line of cattle and horses and captives, the spoils of a season’s raiding. Comanche raiders killed thousands more people south of the Rio Grande than they ever killed in Texas; much of this was done by Penatekas, and much of it was done in what history now sees as their dying days.
Peace in Texas was an illusion, too. How deeply the whites misunderstood the Comanches was evident in the peace treaty of 1844, the product of three years’ work by Sam Houston, who had returned to the presidency in 1841, bringing his pacifist notions back with him. Though the Texans were dealing with only a fraction of the Penateka—the treaty’s signers were only Old Owl and Buffalo Hump (Pah-hah-yuco and Santa Anna were not there)—they persisted in referring to the “Comanche tribe” and the “Comanche nation” as though all of the bands had been part of the negotiations. Sam Houston himself, old Indian hand that he was, persisted in the mistaken belief that Comanche chiefs wielded power over other bands and Kiowas.³⁷ In this formulation, they could thus sign a treaty that all Comanches from eastern Colorado and western Kansas to the Mexican border would dutifully obey. The idea was preposterous. The camp headmen within the Penateka band were barely able to agree among themselves. The dangerous Comanches, the Comanches still riding free and unbeaten and unencumbered on the more remote prairies, as yet undestroyed by war or disease, hadn’t signed anything.
But no one in Texas in the middle century could have told you that. Nor could they have imagined that getting rid of the Comanches was going to take another thirty years of war.
- • •
Colonel Williams’s visit to the Comanche camp put the Parker family back in the headlines—as much for the discovery that Cynthia Ann’s bones were not bleaching in an alkali creek somewhere as for her refusal to return. On June 1, 1846, the Houston Telegraph and Texas Register ran a story about the meeting. “Miss Parker has married an Indian chief,” it said, with the matter-of-factness of a social notice, “and is so wedded to the Indian mode of life that she is unwilling to return to her white kindred.” The story added that every possible effort had been made to reclaim her, but they had all been unsuccessful. “Even if she should be restored to her kindred here,” the story concluded ruefully, “she would probably take advantage of the first opportunity and flee away to the wilds of northern Texas.”
Not everyone was willing to accept this state of affairs. Robert Neighbors, a talented Indian agent who was Texas commissioner of Indian affairs at the time, was foremost among them. Believing that Cynthia Ann was the only white captive still alive among the plains tribes, he mounted a concerted effort in the summer of 1847 to get her back. That meant sending messengers to the villages bearing gifts and money. He had no more luck than Colonel Williams had. “I have used all means in my power during the last summer to induce those Indians to bring her in by offering large rewards,” he wrote in a November 18, 1847, report to the U.S. commissioner of Indian affairs, “but I am assured by the friendly Comanche chiefs that I would have to use force to induce the party that has her to give her up.”
He also said something interesting. He noted that she was “with the Tenna-wish band of Comanches . . . with whom we hold little or no intercourse. They reside on the headwaters of the Red River.”³⁸ If he was right, and he very likely was, then Cynthia Ann and her husband had jumped bands, and in so doing had traveled well west of the normal Penateka ranges. Pah-hah-yuco himself was sometimes affiliated with the Tenawish,³⁹ which might explain the jump. Whatever the cause, it was a clear move away from trouble, away from the death throes of the Penatekas. Cynthia and Peta Nocona were fleeing the Texas frontier. They were refugees. Within a year, the couple changed bands again. They camped even farther north, on Elk Creek south of the Wichita Mountains in Indian Territory (Oklahoma).
There, with the world crashing down around the southern Comanches, a son was born to Cynthia Ann and Peta Nocona. According to later interviews with his descendants, they named him Kwihnai, “Eagle.” If that is true, then the name Quanah is a nickname. Its meaning, too, is far from clear. According to his son Baldwin Parker in a later interview, the name comes from the Comanche “kwaina,” meaning “fragrant.”⁴⁰Though this name is usually translated as “smell,” “odor,” “fragrance,” or “perfume,” the Shoshone root word kwanaru, meaning “stinking,” may suggest the real source of the name. In this theory, people modified his original name to mean “stink.”⁴¹ Within the next two years, Cynthia Ann gave birth to a second son whom she named “Peanuts.” From later interviews with Quanah, the name originated in his mother’s fond childhood memory of eating peanuts around the fireside at Parker’s Fort.⁴² Both names are unusual and suggest that Cynthia Ann, who family legend said was a “spirited squaw,” and her husband had defied Comanche custom by naming the children themselves.⁴³
The first anyone knew of these events was in 1851, when a group of traders led by a man named Victor Rose, who would later write histories of the era, saw her in a Comanche village. When they asked her if she wanted to leave, she shook her head and pointed to her children, saying, “I am happily married. I love my husband, who is good and kind, and my little ones, who, too, are his, and I cannot forsake them.” Rose described Peta as a “great, greasy, lazy buck.”⁴⁴ The account has an odd ring to it: Rose undoubtedly saw Cynthia Ann, because he was the first to report the existence of children. But it is unlikely that she uttered those grammatically perfect sentences. The timing is worth noting. The existence of the two brothers playing at her feet would seem to confirm that Quanah was born before 1850, and possibly as early as 1848. In any case, she was sincere. She was “Nautdah” now, “Someone Found,” the name given to her by Peta Nocona, whose name means “He Who Travels Alone and Returns.”⁴⁵
The last anyone on the frontier heard of Cynthia Ann in the 1850s came in a report from the intrepid explorer Captain Randolph Marcy, a reliable chronicler of the frontier. “There is at this time a white woman among the Middle Comanches, who, with her brother, was captured while they were young children from their father’s house in the Western part of Texas,” he wrote, confirming that she had changed bands and placing her with the Nokonis or the Kotsotekas, who were known as Middle Comanches. “This woman has adopted all the habits and peculiarities of the Comanches; has an Indian husband and children, and cannot be persuaded to leave them.”⁴⁶
For the moment she was free again in the way that Comanches had always been free. In the way that the hapless Penateka no longer were. She was on the open plains, where the buffalo still roamed in their millions and Comanche power stood inviolate. Where the white man still did not dare to go.
