The Searchers

by Glenn Frankel

  James liked what he saw. This was, he believed, his promised land. “The country on the Navasott is the most fertile, most healthy, and subject to fewer objections than any other part of Texas,” he wrote. “There are springs in this section that afford water enough to run a mill. The timber is very large, and of an excellent quality. The rock found along these creeks … is well adapted for building purposes. The range for stock is not surpassed in any country.”

  But the garden was not empty. Several thousand Indians—mostly Caddos, Wichitas, and Kichais—lived in villages along the river banks. They were farmers, hunters, and gatherers, and many of their settlements dated back hundreds of years. Farther to the north and west were thousands more native peoples—Comanches, Lipan Apaches, and Kiowas—who lived a more nomadic and aggressive existence on horseback in the high, arid limestone plains where white men seldom ventured.

  Between these two dramatically distinct regions was a thick belt of forest land known as the Cross Timbers that stretched from southeastern Kansas through the heart of the Indian territories—what is now Oklahoma—and into northern Texas. Washington Irving, who traveled the area in 1832, described a rough terrain of open rolling hills and deep ravines. The land was pleasant during the spring rains when the vegetation grew green and damp, but by the time Irving and his party arrived in the fall, “the herbage was parched; the foliage of the scrubby forests was withered; the whole woodland prospect, as far as the eye could reach, had a brown and arid hue.” Frequent fires scorched and calcified the vegetation, “leaving them black and hard, so as to tear the flesh of man and horse that had to scramble through them … It was like struggling through forests of cast iron.”

  To James Parker, the Cross Timbers seemed like a natural boundary line between the northernmost reaches of white settlement and the southern fringe of Indian territory. But the Comanches, masters of horsemanship and mobility, treated the Timbers like an open door. For decades they swooped down every spring to hunt game and raid other tribes for horses and food. James didn’t seem to grasp—or chose to ignore—that he was putting himself and his extended family in jeopardy. His younger brother Silas went along.

  Daniel Parker chose not to. When he and his caravan arrived in Texas in December 1833, he broke away from James and Silas and settled farther to the south and east, in what is now the town of Elkhart. Daniel feared the new colony that James had in mind was too close to the hostile native peoples and too isolated from the rest of the settler community. He also did not care to preach to an empty choir. He quickly became a prominent member of the fledgling community and served, as in Illinois, as a legislator. Meanwhile, James, Silas, and their older brother Benjamin, a recent widower at age forty-eight, continued along with Elder John and their families to the banks of the Navasota, where they set up camp and began to farm.

  The Parkers were a distinctly American breed—both settlers and warriors. They always traveled with their families, and their homes formed their front line, exposing their wives and children to whatever dangers existed. James Parker and his wife, Martha, brought six children with them to the new settlement. Their red-haired, eighteen-year-old daughter Rachel, married to a prosperous young farmer named Luther Plummer, was the first to give birth in the new colony in January 1835. Rachel and Luther named their son James Pratt, after her father. Sarah, another of James’s and Martha’s daughters, married Lorenzo Nixon on March 26, 1836, with Elder John, her grandfather, presiding. Silas and his wife, Lucy, who was Martha’s sister, had four children. The oldest, Cynthia Ann, born in Illinois in 1827, was a blonde, blue-eyed princess who prowled the new farmland as if it were her private preserve and licked fresh warm milk from the cows.

  The local Indians felt hemmed in and besieged by the interlopers. Hostilities began with the theft of horses and cattle, each side raiding the other. James Parker helped establish treaties with a dozen local chiefs, but not all Indians, nor all whites, honored these arrangements. In July 1835, a band of white settlers seeking stolen horses attacked a Kichai village that had signed a peace accord. The Indian villagers greatly outnumbered the white attackers, who were forced to flee to the Parker settlement. On another occasion, a party of white settlers led by a Colonel Burleson discovered stolen American horses in the possession of two Caddo chiefs, whom they seized and tied to a tree. The chiefs claimed they had recovered the horses on behalf of the colonists but the men refused to believe them. They shot the two chiefs in cold blood. The wife of one of the Indians reported to her fellow tribesmen what had happened.

  James Parker styled himself as a Man Who Knows Indians—their customs, their way of thinking, and their purported talent for treachery. But when it came to Comanches, the most warlike of the native peoples, James knew little. To him these Indians were just another potential obstacle on the road to prosperity and redemption, to be outmaneuvered or eliminated depending upon their level of resistance. “If this region was not infested by hostile Indians, it would be very soon settled,” James would write, as if the natives were a particularly noxious species of disease, “and when once settled and cultivated by civilized man, it will approximate to an earthly paradise.”

  At first the colonists and Comanches circled each other warily, trading horses, food, and firearms. Comanches expected gifts and tribute. It took time for them to discover that the Texans were more aggressive and less pliable than their Mexican neighbors, just as it took time for Texans to realize the Comanches were impossible to intimidate and harder to kill than most Indians. Still, the gap was wide and bloodstained. Each group told stories about the other, and they were inevitably tales of bloodshed and destruction.

  JAMES W. PARKER had extravagantly promised Stephen Austin that he could attract dozens of Americans to his new settlement, but very few actually came. Still, he was a man to seize opportunities. Early on, there were allegations that James was engaged in dealings with local Indians, paying them in counterfeit money for stolen horses. These claims were never proven but they were a calumny that long haunted James’s good name—after all, in Texas the only thing worse than a horse thief was a man who colluded with savages. James solemnly denied the allegations, saying his accusers were seeking “to destroy my reputation, degrade my family, and make my life a burden to me.”

  His new settlement, being far removed from the rest of the pioneer community, was increasingly vulnerable as hostilities between native peoples and newcomers intensified. To protect their families and their livestock, the Parkers in 1835 built a stockade of a half dozen cabins and two blockhouses enclosed by a twelve-foot-tall fence of split cedar timbers. It was home to about forty men, women and children—Parkers, Faulkenberrys, Anglins, and Frosts, all of them related by blood or marriage—and was crammed with farm tools, implements, and supplies, barefoot youngsters with dirty necks, and barnyard animals. The settlers had no nails, screws, or bolts; instead, they split and notched their logs so that the pieces fit snugly together like the fingers of a pair of folded hands. They did their cooking inside the cabins and slept in makeshift lofts that served both as beds and storage areas. Privacy was minimal, clothing was harsh burlap, bathing with strong homemade soap was an occasion rather than an everyday occurrence. The blockhouses were placed at diagonal ends of the fort; the second stories projected beyond the stockade walls and there were gun slots in the floor and on all four walls. At night the livestock were brought inside the walls for protection.

  Old Fort Parker Cabin, July 2008, Groesbeck, Texas. The replica fort was built in 1936 for the centennial of Texas independence and the raid in which Indians abducted Cynthia Ann Parker and four relatives.

  James and Silas formed one of the original three Texas Ranger companies, which began using Parker’s Fort as a base of operations. The Texas General Council authorized Silas to contract and employ twenty-five men, at a salary of $1.25 per day, “to secure the inhabitants residing on the frontiers from the invasions of the hostile Indians.” The Indians increasingly viewed the fort as a military i
nstallation, not a settlement. In any case, it didn’t really matter: settlements, after all, were fair game in the intimate warfare both sides engaged in.

  The winter of 1836 was a desperate time for local Indians, with many deaths due to hunger and disease. They blamed the white settlers for both. According to Comanche oral tradition, a young warrior named Peta Nocona stepped forward to challenge others to join him in a raid on the Texans. Nocona styled himself a wanderer—a man of no fixed ties or kinship in a community in which kinship was essential for survival. But his warrior skills and his single-minded determination won him respect. He was feared, not loved, neither a chief nor a foot soldier.

  The settlers had other reasons to be fearful. Relations between the colonists and the central government in Mexico City were disintegrating due to conflicts over land, money, and control. Daniel Parker was aligned at first with the peace camp that sought reconciliation with the Mexican regime. But the lines quickly shifted and moderates hardened into hawks. Daniel participated in the popular Consultation Assembly that met on November 3, 1835, and approved a “Declaration of the People of Texas,” forming a provisional government even while pledging loyalty to the 1824 constitution under which many of the colonists had entered Texas. They pledged to resist General Antonio López de Santa Anna, the military leader who had seized control of the government in Mexico City. Daniel signed his name just below that of his old militia commander, Sam Houston, by now a registered resident of the municipalidad of Nacogdoches.

  As hostilities spiraled, Daniel became one of the original signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence and joined the Council of the Provisional Government. Santa Anna mustered a force of 5,000 soldiers and invaded Texas, laid siege to and conquered the Alamo, the fortified mission in San Antonio, killing all of its 189 defenders—including Bowie, Travis, and Crockett—on March 6, 1836, then slowly pushed north. Although their fort was more than 200 miles northeast of San Antonio, the Parkers and their neighbors abandoned the stockade and fled east toward the Trinity River for fear that the Mexicans and the Indians would forge an unholy alliance and overrun their small settlement. Houston, appointed as commander of the ragtag Texas army, sent out dispatches urging settlers to flee. But rain fell steadily and the Trinity was too swollen for them to safely cross. “To our minds this was a far more trying time than when Moses led the children of Israel across the Red Sea, for unlike them, we had no inspired leader to call on the Lord to part the waters for us,” recalled J. H. Greenwood, son of Garrison, one of the settler leaders. Instead the Parkers and their neighbors huddled on the western bank along with hundreds of other colonists, hungry, wet, desperate, and fearful they would be trapped. The exodus was known as the Runaway Scrape.

  Then the Lord seemed to intervene. On April 21, Houston’s volunteer army vanquished Santa Anna’s forces at San Jacinto, some 120 miles to the south. Like Israelites miraculously delivered from a vengeful Pharaoh, the Parkers and their neighbors rejoiced, then rushed home and set about hurriedly planting their summer corn crop. There were steady reports and rumors that Indians were preparing to attack. Daniel Parker claimed that an Indian named Jinie Jim warned him that some five hundred warriors, Caddos and other tribes, were gathering on the Trinity River near the Cross Timbers and planning to destroy Parker’s Fort and then move on to other settlements “for the purpose of Killing the white people.” Sam Houston himself expressed misgivings about the vulnerable location of the Parker stockade. But the planting season could not wait: corn had to be sown now or else the Parkers risked a disastrous winter ahead. In any event the danger seemed to have passed, and James Parker disbanded his small Ranger company. The Parkers and their neighbors still carried their aging single-shot rifles when they went to work the fields, but the main gate of the stockade was left open so that the settlers could move in and out easily while catching up on their farmwork. There was, they believed, nothing to fear.

  And so it was a shock on the morning of May 19, while James Parker, his son-in-law Luther Plummer, and most of the other men were out working fields a mile or more away, that a large band of Indians on horseback appeared before the fort waving a soiled white flag. There were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of young warriors—some of the settlers’ accounts would later claim as many as eight hundred. Benjamin Parker approached the group unarmed and asked what they wanted. He came back to tell his brother Silas that the Indians were demanding a steer for meat and directions to a waterhole. Benjamin feared these requests were just a pretext, but he insisted on going back out again in hope of preventing an attack or at least buying time. Silas pleaded with him not to go, but Benjamin felt he had no choice. Silas ran inside to get his ammunition pouch while Benjamin slowly strode back to the Indians. It was a noble but fatal gesture. The warriors surrounded him, clubbed him senseless, and stuck his lifeless body repeatedly with lances. Then they let out a piercing cry, with “voices that seemed to reach the very skies,” and rushed the fort.

  Everything after that was panic and noise and blood and pandemonium. The Indians sprinted for the open gate, while the settlers, mostly women and children, fled wildly. Silas Parker got off one shot before the Indians engulfed him, pounded his head to a wet crimson pulp, and ripped off his scalp with a butcher knife. They killed Samuel Frost and his teenage son Robert inside the fort, then seized Elder John in front of his wife, Sally, shattered his skull with hatchets, and hacked off his scalp and his genitals, then pinned Sally to the ground with a lance through her chest, stripped off her clothes, and left her writhing. Rachel Plummer, bundling eighteen-month-old James Pratt in her arms, tried to flee, but she was cut off by the raiders, knocked down by an Indian wielding one of the farm’s hoes, and beaten over the head until she stopped screaming and let go of the boy. She was forced to remain on the ground, silent, dazed, swollen, and bleeding, burning with fear, certain that the attackers were killing her little boy, until she saw him on a horse, held tight in the blunt arms of a warrior, crying out, “Mother, oh Mother!”

  Some of the hysterical women and children made it to the fields. Sarah Parker Nixon, the other of James’s married daughters, reached her father first, followed by James’s wife, Martha, and their four younger children. James shepherded them across the river; at first he planned to hide them there and set out for the fort, but they pleaded with him not to leave them. Luther Plummer went looking for the other farmers to organize a rescue mission, while Sarah’s husband Lorenzo started immediately for the fort.

  The Indians commenced to plunder the stockade. They slashed open mattresses and scattered the feathers. They tore open James’s books and smashed his medicine bottles. Lucy Parker, Silas’s wife, tried to flee with her four small children. She ran into Lorenzo Nixon, but before he could lead her and the children to safety, Indians surrounded all of them and marched them back to the fort. The Indians forced Lucy to help load her two oldest children behind mounted warriors, and they were in the process of taking the younger two, Silas junior and Orlena, when David Faulkenberry, a lone farmer armed with a single-shot rifle, emerged from the woods and trained his weapon on the attackers. Faulkenberry gathered Lucy, her two young ones, and Nixon behind him and forced the Indians to retreat. But no one could help the other captives.

  Rachel Plummer, covered in blood and bruises, was dragged by her long red hair to the back of an Indian pony and forced to climb on. She saw the Indians shove her young aunt, Elizabeth Kellogg, onto another pony and watched as a warrior triumphantly waved a handful of bloody scalps; the only one she recognized was the long gray hair of her beloved grandfather, Elder John.

  The raiders mounted up and rode away with a flourish, lancing any cattle they came across in a final gesture of vandalism and contempt. They had killed five people and taken five more captive without a single casualty of their own, and now they rode deep into the night, weaving their way through the heavy forested bottomlands with their prisoners: two young women—Rachel Plummer and Elizabeth Kellogg—Rachel’s toddler son, James Prat
t, and her eight-year-old nephew, John. And on another mount, alone and terrified after watching her father, her uncle, and her grandfather all killed before her eyes, and held tight by her Indian captor, the late Silas Parker’s oldest child and the late Elder John Parker’s forty-ninth grandchild: nine-year-old Cynthia Ann.

  2.

  The Captives (Comancheria, 1836)

  Almost from the moment of her abduction, Cynthia Ann Parker’s family began telling and retelling the story, and shaping the facts to fit their own needs and understanding. The first narrators were her uncle James and the other men at Parker’s Fort who had failed to rescue her and the other captives. Their excuse was simple: they had been caught by surprise, and the vast numbers and brutality of the assailants had left them no time nor means to respond. Were there, in reality, eight Indians or, as some of the witnesses claimed, eight hundred? We will never know.

  James Parker claimed he had grabbed his long gun and started immediately for the stockade, only to be intercepted by his fleeing wife, Martha, and their children. Fellow farmer George Dwight, who had also fled the fort, told him that everyone there had either been killed or taken prisoner. At that point, James said, he abandoned his rescue plans and gathered the terrified survivors; he led them up the Navasota River, retracing their steps by walking backwards so that the Indians couldn’t track them along the sandy riverbank. Six adults—including Martha, who was eight months pregnant—and twelve children set off under cover of darkness for the safety of Tinnin’s settlement some forty miles to the east. They had no horses, food, blankets, or spare clothing. Most had no shoes. The grown-ups carried the smaller children on their backs. “We were in the howling wilderness, barefooted and bare-headed,” James would write, “a savage and relentless foe on the one hand; on the other, a traceless and uninhabited country literally covered with venomous reptiles and ravenous beasts.”