The Searchers

by Glenn Frankel

  Recent historians have disagreed. Joaquin Rivaya-Martínez, a Texas State University scholar, collected and studied archival documents, ethnographic field studies, and other data on 350 kidnapped women, both Anglos and Mexicans, and found clear indications of sexual abuse in only nine cases. He conceded the evidence is spotty: those who recorded the contemporary accounts of these women may have omitted sexual episodes to protect the reputations of the victims, and many of the younger women may well have become the wives or concubines of their captors. The line between rape and coerced marriage was fuzzy, Rivaya-Martínez concluded. Still, he did not uncover any evidence suggesting that Comanches seized women for the explicit purpose of sexual gratification. Indeed, on the warpath, men would have shunned sex so as not to dilute their puha, or medicine.

  Once removed from the battlefield, however, the men had no such fear. A captive woman could be considered the common property of an entire war party or of the man who captured her. Those like Rachel who were destined to be kept as slaves might be treated well enough to survive. Others were sexually violated and left to die. Geoffrey and Susan Michno, who compiled accounts of captives throughout the Great Plains, reported that of eighty-three women ages thirteen or older whose stories they studied, forty-eight were almost certainly raped and another twenty-nine probably were. “The sweeping generalizations by Dodge and Fehrenbach are overstatements—but only slightly,” they write.

  No matter what the numbers, it only took a few incidents of rape to terrorize Texas settlers and feed the legend of Indian rapacity and the notion that to be captured by Comanches was the classic Fate Worse than Death. Those women who returned to the white world were often closely scrutinized to see if their purity and moral standing had been compromised. Those who admitted they had submitted to the sexual demands of their captors in order to remain alive could find themselves shunned by husbands, friends, and relatives.

  The more benign experience seemed to be that of abducted boys and girls between the ages of six and twelve. A team of modern psychologists could not have drawn up a more thorough method for absorbing a young person into the tribe. After being brutalized by his or her immediate captors and spirited north on a harrowing journey, the captive would be turned over to a family that oftentimes had lost a child of its own and treated the new addition with kindness and affection. Within a matter of months the young person would lose the ability to speak English, and memories of parents and families faded or were crowded out altogether by many kindnesses and new adventures.

  * * *

  COMANCHE ORAL TRADITION— handed down, buffed, and embellished over five generations—claims that nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker was taken to a village somewhere across the Red River, where she was adopted by a childless couple, bathed in a creek to wash off the blood, dirt, and fear, and taken into their home. Peta Nocona, the young warrior who was part of the raiding party at Parker’s Fort, made a claim on her life and her labor; within a few years he would make her one of his wives. But Cynthia Ann herself left no oral or written account of her life as a Comanche. It’s possible to draw conclusions from her actions, but not from her words.

  There was another young girl, Dot Babb’s sister Bianca, who was ten when she was abducted during the raid on her family farm, and her experience most likely closely paralleled that of Cynthia Ann. Bianca produced an unpublished memoir that is the only first-person Comanche captivity narrative by a young girl. Just as Cynthia Ann watched Indians kill her father, uncle, and grandfather, Bianca watched Indians shoot her mother in the back with an arrow, plunge a lance through her throat, and scalp her as she lay dying. After the raiders dragged a terrified Bianca from the farmhouse, she grabbed hold of a tree trunk and refused to let go even after an Indian pulled a long knife from his belt and threatened to cut her hands off. After several feints with the knife, he laughed and put it away, then “jerked me so hard that the rough bark on the post tore the flesh from the inside of my hands.” Still, she pledged to herself not to cry—and the warrior who grabbed her told her later that if she had cried, he would have killed her on the spot. He threw her on the back of his horse and rode off with a band of raiders and two other captives: her older brother Dot, then fourteen, and Sarah Luster, a visitor to the house.

  Mrs. Luster escaped one evening with Dot’s help, after which the warriors struck him in the chest with a pistol. Dot refused to cry or beg for mercy. Next, they tied him to a tree and placed a ring of dead grass, leaves, and limbs around him and set them on fire. Still, he did not flinch. A terrified Bianca began to laugh hysterically, causing Dot to laugh as well. The warriors then aimed their bows and arrows at him. But their leader told them to put down their weapons. “They thought he was brave enough to make a good warrior, and decided not to kill him,” Bianca recalled.

  After a harrowing ten-day ride to the heart of Comancheria, Bianca was taken to a Comanche village. She was immediately surrounded by curious men, women, and children, most of whom had never seen a white girl before. With her fists and feet she fought off the friendly mob that pulled at her. The children stroked her long blonde hair. Even the camp’s vast population of dogs “seemed to be as anxious to make my acquaintance.” Her captor turned her over to his sister, Tekwashana, a childless young widow whose husband had been killed by whites. Tekwashana made Bianca a bed of dry grass, blankets, and buffalo robes on the floor of her teepee. On cold nights Tekwashana would stand Bianca in front of the fire and turn her around slowly until she was warm, then wrap her in a buffalo robe. Tekwashana dressed her in bracelets, earrings, and a headdress and taught her how to ride a horse, but also assigned her to fetch water, gather wood, and help move camp. “She was always very thoughtful of me and seemed to care as much for me as if I was her very own child,” Bianca would recall.

  That first night the Indians held a feast in her honor. They had a rare meal of bread and coffee with sugar. From the start, “I was made to know that my life was to be a regular Indian life,” she wrote. “… Children came to play with me and tried to make me welcome into their kind of life.” They named her Tijana—“Texas” in Comanche—although her nickname was “Smell Bad When You Walk” because she had soiled her clothing when she was first captured.

  Tekwashana taught Bianca how to swim by letting go of her in the deepest part of the river. She made her adopted daughter a calico dress from a large piece of cloth without using a stitch; she pierced Bianca’s ears with a red-hot needle, then adorned her in silver earrings with long silver chains that hung down to her shoulders. Mother and daughter would jump into the river, take off their dresses and rub them together, wring them out, and spread them on the bushes to dry while playing in the water.

  Bianca’s Comanches were not the grim warriors and harsh taskmasters of Rachel Plummer’s harrowing narrative but simple people “of a jovial, happy disposition, always friendly and playing some kind of joke on the other fellow.” Their children must have been exceptionally good, she wrote, because “in all the time I was with them I do not remember of seeing them correct or punish one.”

  “Every day,” according to Bianca Babb, “seemed to be a holiday.”

  Seven months after Bianca was taken, a white scout named J. J. Sturm came to her village seeking to ransom her. Bianca, who could still recall her old life in Texas, told a stunned Tekwashana that she wanted to go back home with Sturm. Her adoptive mother “hung her head and would not talk to me.”

  That night Bianca slept outside the teepee on the side she knew Tekwashana slept near. After Bianca fell asleep, however, Tekwashana carried her inside. Tekwashana gathered a pile of dried meat and water jugs and hatched a plan to flee with Bianca and stay away until Sturm gave up and left. An exhausted Bianca acquiesced. She quickly grew so tired that Tekwashana carried her on her back, but Sturm tracked them down the next day, put Bianca on the back of his horse, and rode off, leaving a brokenhearted Tekwashana to trail behind on foot.

  Bianca Babb, who lived to be ninety-three, never saw her Co
manche mother again.

  3.

  The Uncle (Texas, 1837–1852)

  James Parker returned home from his fruitless search for the captives to a young Texas republic mired in chaos and bankruptcy. Steeped in debt, struggling for foreign recognition, facing ongoing tensions and intermittent eruptions with Mexico, uncertain borders and periodic outbreaks of violence with hostile native peoples, Sam Houston was struggling to keep his sprawling, improbable new country afloat. He had no inclination to supply James with men and money to launch a punitive rescue mission, despite steady pressure from the Reverend Daniel Parker, who used his political influence in the new capital on behalf of his younger brother. “No man can regret more sincerely than I do the misfortune which has taken place,” Houston wrote to Daniel on February 13, 1837, referring to the massacre at Parker’s Fort. But sympathy was one thing, money and men were another. Neither was forthcoming.

  Still, James persisted. Later that month he journeyed back to Indian territory, posting a reward of $300 for the return of any white captive. After another false hope—the appearance of yet another freed white female captive who turned out not to be Rachel—James set out with a rifle, four pistols, a Bowie knife, pen and paper, and a small sum collected on a debt. He hatched a new scheme to stalk the Comanche camps and strew about written notes near watering places in the hope that Rachel would find one of them and meet him at a designated spot.

  James and an unnamed companion rode for three days to Comancheria, then ran into trouble on their first night in hostile territory. Indians tried to steal their horses, and James fired his rifle and chased off the assailants. He and his sidekick didn’t linger—they broke camp and rode all night to put distance between themselves and their attackers—but the next morning they rode into another ambush. A bullet grazed James’s ear and cheek. He wheeled and shot one Indian with his rifle, then another, while his partner shot a third. The two men galloped away. There was no time, James would write with his trademark sarcasm, “to wish our three friends in ambush a comfortable rest and pleasant dreams.”

  His shaken partner headed home, but James kept going and finally managed to locate a Comanche camp. He spent weeks trying to make contact with Rachel. Sometimes he went for days without food, and his powers of reason seemed to fail him. He got nowhere—based upon Rachel’s own narrative, it’s not clear she was ever in the area—and after a month he gave up. He’d been gone from home this time for five months. The search was hardening into an obsession.

  James journeyed to Houston City, the new capital. The young republic of Texas was like a traveling road show: it would set up shop, run up bills, wear out its welcome, then abscond to the next friendly town. Following this dubious pattern, it occupied five different capitals over the nine years of its existence. Houston was no city but rather a raw, mud-caked collection of cabins, tents, saloons, and a two-story, peach-colored, wood-framed capitol building. By one resident’s reckoning, more than half the population of six hundred were gamblers and drunkards. President Houston received visitors in a log cabin of two rooms divided by an open passageway with a dirt floor—the kind of house known to settlers as a “dog trot.” This was the executive mansion.

  Sam Houston had long concluded that James Parker was not to be trusted, based not only on Houston’s own experience but on the claims of others who had seen James in action. James himself referred to these claims in a June 1837 letter to Houston, bristling with misspellings and antagonism, that was both a heartfelt plea for aid and not-so-veiled bill of indictment. James in effect accused Houston of countenancing the murder of his daughter Rachel and the other captives by refusing to support his rescue efforts. “Calling me a fool and a mad man was entirely an unnecessary waste of time and paper, but the denying of any means to facilitate the release of the prisoners [my family] I really thought hard of,” James wrote. He goaded the great man: “Will the nerve of the conquering hero of San Jacinto be still and let our bleeding fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and children cry in vain and offer no cheering or promising prospects of release or revenge[?]”

  Somehow the letter worked. Houston authorized James to raise a company of 120 men and commanded him to go out and “flog those Indians.” Even so, Houston cautioned James to discriminate between friend and foe. “The friendly Indians I hope will unite with us for the sake of spoils, and the pay which they are to receive for their services,” he wrote.

  But the truce did not last long. James and his company of volunteers, including his younger brothers Nathaniel and Joseph, spent more than a month combing the territory along the Red River for signs of the captives and terrorizing Indian villagers. Word of James’s activities trickled back to Houston, who angrily ordered the unit disbanded. James insisted he was being falsely accused, but Houston ignored his protests.

  Back on his own again, James made two more unsuccessful forays into Indian Territory in 1837 and bagged one more unsuspecting Native American. At a trading post near the Sabine River, he came across an Indian wearing an old yellow buckskin vest with buttons made out of gourds. James was certain it was one of his own garments from the cabin at Parker’s Fort. When the Indian gave a vague account of how he had come by it, James grew more and more furious: “Every nerve of my system involuntarily trembled,” he writes, as he thought of his slain father and brothers and the kidnapped children. He saw the Indian as “one of the authors of all my woe.”

  James instructed the men he was with to ride ahead. “As soon as the opportunity presented itself,” he writes, “I mounted my horse, and taking a ‘last fond look’ at my vest—with one eye through the sight of my trusty rifle—I turned and left the spot, with the assurance that my vest had got a new button hole.” After the shooting, other Indians attempted to grab his horse’s bridle, but James fought his way through the mob, swinging his sword, and rode off after his companions.

  This trip, James’s fifth in eighteen months, ended like all of its predecessors. Sick, tired, and broke, he returned home empty-handed in late October. Then a few weeks later came a breakthrough. James saw a report in a Houston City newspaper: Rachel, it said, had turned up alive in Independence, Missouri.

  MEXICAN TRADERS DOING BUSINESS with a band of Comanches somewhere in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains spotted a white woman with long red hair and offered to buy her, knowing they could redeem her for a good price from her relatives. After months of despair eating away at her spirit and her health like a relentless predator, Rachel suddenly came to life. One of the traders proposed a sum that her Comanche owner rejected as too low. The trader offered more, but the master again said no. The trader indicated he had reached his limit. Rachel’s heart sank. “Had I the treasures of the universe, how freely I would have given it,” she would recall. Then the man made a third offer and her owner consented. “My whole feeble frame was convulsed in an ecstasy of joy.”

  Her rescuers took her to Santa Fe—a rugged seventeen-day journey—and brought her to the home of William and Mary Donoho, American settlers in the territory, which was still ruled by Mexico. The Donohos paid off the traders and took in Rachel, who was suffering from exposure and malnutrition. They treated her with great kindness—in Mary Donoho, Rachel writes, she found “a mother to direct me in that strange land [and] a sister to condole with me in my misfortune.” Santa Fe was a wild frontier town—four men had been gunned down in the streets in recent weeks—and William Donoho decided it was no longer safe for him and his family to remain. He and Mary packed up their three children, along with Rachel and Caroline Harris, another recently liberated captive whose baby, like Rachel’s, had been killed before her eyes by Comanches. They organized a small caravan for the eight-hundred-mile trek east along the Santa Fe Trail to Missouri. Weakened and scarred from sixteen months in captivity, Rachel had to endure yet another grueling overland journey. She had no idea whether her husband or father or any of her relatives had survived the massacre at Fort Parker, nor whether her son James Pratt had been recovered. Once sh
e got to Independence, she was so starved for information that she immediately tried to start out on foot for Texas, and had to be restrained. She ached for a way to get home.

  Comanche brave, photographed by Will Soule.

  It was early January 1838 when Lorenzo Nixon, Rachel’s brother-in-law, arrived in Independence. Overcome with emotion, Rachel was too weak to stand and embrace him. Still, she insisted they leave for Texas at once. “Every moment was an hour, and it was now very cold weather, but I thought I could stand anything if I could only get started towards my own country,” she writes.

  A few days later, they set out on the thousand-mile journey. Rachel arrived at her father’s home in Huntsville on February 19, 1838, exactly twenty-one months after the massacre at Parker’s Fort. In her narrative, she describes “the exquisite pleasure that my soul has long panted for” in embracing her family. But James Parker’s spirited and robust daughter had been reduced to a fragile, uncertain creature. Her appearance was “most pitiable,” he would write. “Her emaciated body was covered with the scars, the evidence of the savage barbarity to which she had been subject … She was in very bad health.”

  RACHEL’S HEALTH WAS ONLY ONE of James’s pressing problems that winter. He was facing a whispering campaign of attacks on his character and his shady business dealings. Texas was an untamed and wide-open frontier society where swindles and gunplay were as much a part of the landscape as tumbleweed. But even by those rugged standards, James was a man apart. His anonymous accusers claimed he had secret dealings with Indians to steal horses from whites and had paid off the Indians with counterfeit money, angering the warriors and triggering the reprisal raid on Parker’s Fort. Even worse, James was accused of killing a woman and her daughter during a botched robbery in 1837. Counterfeiting, horse theft, and murder were the kinds of accusations that could earn a man a perfunctory trial and the hangman’s noose.