Tales with a Texas Twist

by Donna Ingham

  They caught Santa Anna quite literally with his pants down, and he fled his fancy tent wearing only red slippers, a white linen shirt, a fine gray vest, and white silk drawers. The battle lasted only eighteen minutes, and the Mexican army was routed. Santa Anna was captured the next day. Texas had won its independence from Mexico.

  Emily survived the battle and likely made her way back to New Washington only seven or eight miles away. She apparently had lost her free papers, maybe in the confusion at San Jacinto; documents show that she applied for a “passport” early in 1837 to return east. And she was never heard from again, at least not in Texas. But her name lives on in part because it was linked to the words of a song.

  There’s a yellow rose in Texas

  That I am going to see;

  Nobody else could love her,

  Not half as much as me.

  She cried so when I left her

  It liked to broke my heart,

  And, if I ever find her,

  We never more will part.

  The White Comanche of the Plains

  I first read about Cynthia Ann Parker in my Texas history books in school. She got only a sentence or two saying that she was a captive white woman who became the mother of Quanah Parker. The rest of the information was about him. But what we can sort out of her story is worth telling, too.

  Geographically it stretches from the woods of east Texas to the plains of the Texas Panhandle. It is a story of the clash and blend of cultures. I became even more interested in her story when I found out that we’re some sort of distant cousins. Her great aunt was my great-great-great-grandmother. So I was prompted to do some serious research, and out of that research came this story.

  I never lost as much but twice—

  And that was in the sod—

  Twice have I stood a beggar

  Before the door of God.

  Emily Dickinson wrote those lines around 1858 up in Amherst, Massachusetts. But they might well have been spoken by a Texas woman living at about the same time. Her story of double loss began in 1836.

  It was May. She was nine years old. She was called Cynthia Ann or Cindy Ann, and she was a pretty little thing with blonde hair and blue eyes. Already her life was exciting. She was a pioneer, come to the banks of the Navasota River with her family and a small group of settlers—about thirty in all—headed up by her grandfather, a hard-shell Baptist called Elder John. They had built a settlers’ fort and planted corn outside its walls.

  As a child of pioneers, little Cindy Ann had learned to do her share of work. She fed the chickens and helped her mother with household chores and helped take care of her three younger siblings. And she was happy there at the fort, secure in her child’s faith and trust that her parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles would take care of her and keep her safe. Then one spring afternoon all that changed, and little Cindy Ann experienced real loss for the first time.

  It was just past the middle of May, and the bluebonnets had already gone to seed. The Texans had lost their battle at the Alamo, but they’d won at San Jacinto just about a month before.

  In truth, however, little of that really mattered at the settlers’ fort.

  They worried less about the likes of Santa Anna and more about raiding Comanches and Kiowas. Yet on this particular day in May the gates were open, and most of the men were outside the fort working in the cornfields. Only five or six men remained inside with the women and children.

  We might imagine that Cindy Ann was outside—feeding the chickens maybe, holding the chicken feed in her gathered apron or skirt and throwing it on the ground and clucking for the old hens to come—when she saw a band of Indians ride up. She wouldn’t be alarmed, necessarily, because the Indians were carrying a dirty white flag, a sign of truce.

  But she would be curious, and she would watch as one man, her uncle Benjamin, went out to parlay with the Indians. She might even have overheard when her uncle Benjamin came back inside the fort and told his brother (Cindy Ann’s daddy, Silas) that the Indians had asked for water and beef. Benjamin also said that he thought they were hostile and looking for trouble.

  Nevertheless, her uncle Benjamin walked back outside, accompanied this time by Silas, and Cindy Ann’s curiosity turned to horror and fear. For the Indians killed Benjamin, ran him through with lances. Silas turned and ran for the still-open gates of the fort. But he didn’t make it. He was cut down by a barrage of arrows.

  Then the Indians threw down their white flag and rode through the open gates. They killed the rest of the men, including Elder John, and assaulted all the women they caught. And they caught most of them.

  But Cynthia Ann’s mother, Lucy, had the presence of mind to gather up her children and run for the back gate of the fort, knowing if they got through that and across the clearing behind it, they could hide in the protective cover along the river. They made it through the gate, and they were running and running across the clearing.

  “Hurry up, Cindy! Hurry up, John!”

  Lucy was carrying the baby, pulling the toddler. “We can hide in the bushes. Come along. Hurry!”

  Several of the Indian outriders, however, saw them running across that clearing and galloped their ponies to cut off any escape. Then they demanded that Lucy yield up her two oldest children, nine-year-old Cynthia Ann and six-year-old John, and even help hoist them up onto the ponies behind two of the warriors.

  The Indians took five captives that day: two women and three children. The two women would become Comanche slaves; the children would be more or less adopted by Comanche families.

  On that long ride away from all she’d ever known of home and family, Cindy Ann cried and prayed, as her granddaddy had taught her. She prayed that some surviving family member would come and save them. Or maybe even the Texas Rangers. But no one followed. At least she still had John to be big sister to; she still had that much family left.

  Then, a few days out, Cindy Ann and John and the others were separated, taken to different camps, and Cindy Ann’s real sense of loss overcame her. In the massacre at the fort she had lost her father, her grandfather, and her uncle—all now in the sod. And when she watched her brother riding off one way while she was going another, her last tie with the white world was cut forever. She lost her heritage, her people that day. She never lost as much but once.

  The Comanches in the Penataki camp welcomed the little captive girl, and she was given to a childless couple to raise as their own. She was given full tribal rights and a new name: Nadua, meaning “she who keeps warm with us.” Nadua’s new parents expected her to learn Comanche ways and to do her share of chores, just as she had at the settlers’ fort. She learned to scrape the buffalo hides and hang strips of buffalo meat on the drying racks, and she gathered wood and buffalo chips for the fire. She began to learn the Comanche language and to form attachments. Memories of her life at the fort began to fade, and she stopped hoping to be rescued by her family or even by the Texas Rangers.

  With the resilience of childhood, she found happiness again. She learned to ride, as every Comanche must, and she hunted for berries and wild honey and healing herbs. She came to revere the land as the Comanches did and to love her new people.

  She thrived and blossomed into young womanhood, catching the eye of a respected warrior named Peta Nocona, who brought horses and blankets to Nadua’s father’s tepee as a rich bridal price. Her father accepted the horses by running them in with his own, and Nadua and Peta Nocona were married.

  Peta Nocona took her north to his Quohadi band, and they camped along the Canadian River and in the beautiful Palo Duro Canyon. There Nadua’s first son was born; she named him Fragrance. In the years that followed she had two more children, another son and a daughter, and she was happy.

  On at least two occasions she was spotted by white traders and military men who tried in vain to ransom her back for her white family,
but she did not wish to go and ran away in tears. The Comanches threatened the whites if they did not drop the subject, so, of course, they did. Once again, Nadua felt secure in the knowledge that her people—this time her Comanche people— would protect her. But all that was to change one winter day, and Nadua would experience real loss for the second time.

  It was just past the middle of December in 1860. Nadua had been a Comanche for twenty-four years. Comanche warriors had to hunt well into the winter now because the white buffalo hunters had thinned out the buffalo herds with their Sharps rifles. Nadua and the other women in the work party were waiting by the fire for the men to return from the day’s hunt. Nadua was holding her baby daughter, Prairie Flower, close to her to shield the little girl from the blue norther blowing in over the plains.

  Then she saw a band of riders coming toward their camp near the Pease River. They carried flags, but not white ones. These were the flags of the Second Cavalry, and they accompanied Sul Ross and the Texas Rangers. On a punitive raid, the soldiers and the Rangers rode into the camp, firing their weapons and killing everyone they saw, mostly women and children.

  But Nadua, like her mother all those years before at Parker’s Fort, had the presence of mind to run with little Prairie Flower in her arms, mount her horse, and ride into the wind. The soldiers pursued. Some say it was a young Irish lieutenant—others that it was Charles Goodnight himself, a young Ranger scout at the time—who was able to see, when her buffalo robe blew back and she turned to look at her pursuers, that Nadua had blonde hair and blue eyes. He shouted, “Don’t shoot her! She’s white!”

  So her life was spared, but she was taken captive—again. Her Parker relatives took her in and treated her kindly enough, except that they locked her in her room at night because she repeatedly tried to escape to get back to her husband and her sons. She helped with the chores, but in the evening she sat on the front porch holding Prairie Flower and looked toward the north and west as if she were waiting for Peta Nocona to come and rescue her. But no one came.

  At least she still had little Prairie Flower to mother; she still had that much of her family. But four years after their capture by the Rangers, Prairie Flower came down with a white man’s fever and died. For the second time Nadua’s loss of family was complete. She never lost as much but twice.

  Nadua responded to Prairie Flower’s death as a Comanche: She slashed her chest in mourning and slowly but deliberately grieved herself to death. She was given a white woman’s funeral and buried with her Parker relatives in east Texas.

  Now only her firstborn son, Fragrance—in Comanche, Quanah—survived. Her husband, Peta Nocona, refused treatment for his battle wounds and died from infection. Pecan, her second son, died of cholera, another white man’s disease.

  It was Quanah Parker—he took his mother’s family name to honor her—who became the last great war chief of the free Comanches. And his is another story. But in 1910, shortly before his own death in 1911, he wrote to his Parker relatives, asking that his mother’s bones be returned to him in Oklahoma so that he could properly mourn her. At first they refused. Then his letter was read from a church pulpit in east Texas. This is what it said, in part:

  My mother, she fed me, carry me in her arms, put me to sleep. I play, she happy. I cry, she sad. She love her boy. They took my mother away, took Texas away. Not let her boy see her. Now she dead. Her boy want to bury her, sit by her mound. My people, her people, we now all one people.

  The bones were sent to Oklahoma. Quanah Parker cut his braids and mourned. A little more than six weeks later, he was buried beside his mother, Cynthia Ann Parker-Nadua, the white Comanche of the plains.

  Sam Bass, the Texas Robin Hood

  Sam Bass was born in Indiana, but his fame stems from exploits in Texas, where he settled as a young man and became an outlaw. Bass was noted for his generosity with the money he stole. One such story comes from near Denton, where Bass spent more of his time racing his mare than he did robbing banks and trains. Nevertheless, he had a reputation and had to be careful about showing his face in town. So he acquired the things he needed in somewhat unorthodox ways. Finally betrayed by one of his own cohorts, Bass was shot and killed by Texas Rangers in 1878 in Round Rock. He died on his twenty-seventh birthday. This tale is crafted from a story collected by J. Frank Dobie.

  Shelton Story had himself his first brand-new saddle. It was slick and shiny and had the smell of new leather about it. Oh, he was mighty proud of that saddle and thought the pleasant creak of it when his horse moved under him to be sweeter than waltz music. He was out polishing on his saddle one morning when his neighbor Pete hollered at him.

  “Say, Shelton,” Pete said, “how would you like to take this hindquarter of beef out to some men camped on Denton Creek? I’ll give you a dollar.”

  “Sure,” Shelton said. After all, a dollar was a dollar.

  So Shelton and the neighbor carefully wrapped the beef in an old yellow slicker and tied it on, the neighbor thinking to protect the beef and Shelton thinking to protect his new saddle.

  Shelton rode a good ways out toward Denton Creek and finally spotted the camp about mid-afternoon. He saw four men, all of them wearing guns and holsters. Their saddle rifles were lying nearby. The sight was enough to cause Shelton to stop some distance away and call out, “I’ve come to bring the beef.”

  “Did old Pete send you?” called back one of the men.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, come on over then and get down and sit a spell.”

  To tell you the truth, Shelton didn’t really want to get down and sit a spell, but the way the man said it, it sounded more like a command than an invitation. So Shelton got down off his horse. He and the man untied the slicker-wrapped beef, and Shelton wiped the backside of his saddle, where it had rested, with his shirt sleeve.

  “That’s a mighty fine saddle you’ve got there,” the man said.

  “Yes, sir,” Shelton said, prouder than ever.

  “How about trading your saddle for mine?” the man asked. Shelton looked where the man pointed and saw an old hull of a saddle. Then he looked at all those six-shooters and saddle rifles and didn’t say anything. He just nodded.

  As the man was cinching up his old beat-up saddle on Shelton’s horse, he said, “Do you know who I am, kid?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, I’m Sam Bass.”

  Shelton didn’t say anything to that, either. He just nodded again, thinking to himself that Sam Bass must be about the meanest, most low-downdest man in Texas. As a matter of fact, Shelton would just as soon ride home bareback as take this old wreck of a saddle. Why, the only good parts of it left were the saddlebags.

  But Sam Bass had put that saddle on and girted it up himself, and Shelton had heard a thing or two about Sam Bass. For one thing, he was an outlaw, pure and simple, and for another, he was a good shot. Folks said he’d six-shootered his initials in the trunk of a live oak tree one time riding by at full gallop. Even though Bass had never been known to shoot a man down, Shelton wasn’t figuring on taking any chances.

  So he mounted up and started home, knowing that he’d been taken advantage of. When he got home, he took that old saddle off and threw it on the ground like he was trying to split wood.

  That’s when he heard something, just a jingling sound. He went to investigate, and when he opened one of those saddlebags, he found three $20 gold pieces. Then he tried the other saddlebag and found three more.

  Well, Shelton went down and bought himself a brand new rig— another new saddle even fancier and prettier than the one he’d had. And he had enough money left to buy a silver-plated bit and spurs, a real Navajo blanket, a fancy pair of boots, and leggings, too.

  That’s when Shelton’s opinion of that meanest, low-downdest man in Texas began to change for the better, and he started telling his own story about Sam Bass, the Texas Robin Hood.


  The Story Behind the Story

  Shortly after the Civil War, cattle ranchers in Texas were among those who began to trail their cattle herds great distances to market. Two such cattlemen were Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving. In 1866 they blazed a trail from Belknap, Texas, to Fort Sumner, New Mexico, and ultimately to Colorado. It became known as the Goodnight-Loving Trail, and over the following years it was one of the most heavily traveled routes in the Southwest. Loving died in 1867 after fighting off a band of Comanches who attacked him on the trail. Goodnight later gave his account of that experience.

  O bury me not on the lone prairie,

  Where the coyotes howl and the wind blows free.

  In a narrow grave just six by three

  O bury me not on the lone prairie.

  It matters not, I’ve oft been told,

  Where the body lies when the heart grows cold.

  Yet grant, oh grant, this wish to me:

  O bury me not on the lone prairie.

  Back in 1985 there was a fellow named Larry McMurtry who wrote a book about Texas called Lonesome Dove. And if you’ve ever read that book, you may remember that toward the end of it—it’s on page 877 in my paperback copy—there’s a scene where one of the characters, Woodrow Call, says to his dying partner, Augustus McCrae, “This would make a story if there was anybody to tell it.” He was talking, of course, about Gus’s request that Woodrow carry his body all the way back from Montana to Texas, thousands of miles by wagon, and bury him along the banks of his beloved Guadalupe River. And about Gus’s wanting to leave his half of the herd to some lady friend.

  Well now, you’ve got to wonder sometimes how folks like McMurtry come up with these far-fetched, even bizarre ideas about some old boy getting himself shot up by Indians, being mortally wounded and knowing he’s dying, and then making his partner promise to take his body all the way back to Texas. And about his partner doing it—after letting that body winter over while he finishes a cattle drive.