The Searchers

by Glenn Frankel

  The accusers were not all anonymous. Late in 1838 James was accosted on the street in neighboring Montgomery by a local man named William W. Shepperd, who publicly repeated the accusations. James sued Shepperd for $10,000 for slander; Shepperd denied he had made the specific allegations. James applied to the court for a change of venue because “the prejudice existing at this time in the … said county … would prevent him from obtaining justice.” The case never went to trial, but vigilantes came looking for James at his ranch house. He was away at the time, but the men warned his wife that “they would whip him and destroy the property,” James wrote in a letter to Texas officials. He went into hiding and ordered his family to flee to his brother Joseph’s home in Houston City, seventy miles away.

  While many ransomed female captives found themselves the object of abuse and suspicion once they were returned to white society, there is no indication that Rachel’s family treated her with anything but love and concern. She became pregnant soon after reuniting with her husband, Luther, and the unexpected journey to Houston City in midwinter was yet another physical ordeal for her. James joined his family there, and in January 1839 he published a five-page pamphlet denying the three main charges against him and proclaiming his innocence. “My success engendered malice in the hearts of some,” he writes, “who, if they could not elevate themselves to my level, were determined to drag me down to theirs.”

  Although crammed into her uncle Joseph’s house in Houston City, Rachel managed to complete a crisp, harrowing twenty-seven page account of her captivity. She outlined several goals in the preface, including the hope that readers would gain sympathy for captives and help campaign for their release. And she concluded with a premonition of her own fate, saying she was offering the following pages to the public “feeling assured that before they are published, the hand that penned them will be cold in death.” The small book, which quickly sold out, confirmed Texans’ worst fears about Comanche barbarism.

  Rachel gave birth that same month to a boy, whom she and Luther named Wilson. But Rachel and her frail newborn were dying. She was still obsessed with the fate of her missing son James Pratt, who by now would have been four years old. “This life had no charms for her,” her father writes. “Her only wish was that she might live to see her son restored to his friends.” Crushed physically and emotionally by her long ordeal and haunted by her lost son, Rachel Plummer died on March 19, 1839. Wilson died two days later.

  Spurred on by his dying daughter’s last request, James continued the fruitless search for his grandson, nephew, and niece—James Pratt Plummer and John and Cynthia Ann Parker, now nearly three years in captivity. He formally applied for guardianship of all four of Silas and Lucy’s children in 1840, including “John Parker and Sinthy Ann Parker supposed to be among the Comanche Indians.” But he had other ambitions as well. That same year he traveled to the new Texas capital in Austin with a wild scheme to raise an army of four thousand men to invade New Mexico, which was still under Mexican control, capture Santa Fe, forge a treaty with local Indians, and take control of the Santa Fe Trail. The legislators, who were focused on more pressing concerns, paid no attention.

  WHILE JAMES PARKER WAS WAGING his personal crusade against Indians, the Republic of Texas was locked in an increasingly savage war with Comanches and other tribes. Sam Houston’s good-neighbor policy had produced at best a fragile peace that was constantly shattered by raiding parties and retaliation. West Texas was a lawless battleground where Comanches and Rangers regularly ambushed each other and settlers lived in constant fear of Indian attack. Houston left office in December 1838, replaced by Mirabeau Lamar, a popular hard-liner who advocated expulsion of the Cherokees and other purportedly peaceful tribes in eastern Texas and a war of extermination against the Comanches and Kiowas in the west. “If the wild cannibals of the woods will not desist from their massacres, if they continue to war upon us with the ferocity of tigers and hyenas, it is time that we should retaliate their warfare,” Lamar proclaimed in his opening address to the Texas Congress in December 1838. He was not a man for half measures when it came to Indians. The goal, he said, was “their total extinction or total expulsion.”

  What had started as a tit-for-tat struggle over horse thievery and hunting rights was quickly evolving into the most protracted conflict ever waged on American soil, a forty-year blood feud between two alien civilizations. Neither side believed the other was fully human. Comanches saw the Texans as invaders without conscience who occupied their lands, destroyed their hunting grounds, and broke every promise. Texans saw Comanches as human vermin, brutal, merciless, and sadistic.

  Still, despite the huge gap in their experiences and consciousness, Indians and settlers were intimate enemies. When they waged war against each other, they killed with rifles, pistols, tomahawks, and bows and arrows—at close range, often while looking into the faces of their victims. There were no boundaries or rules and no noncombatants. It was truly a war of populations: destroying a man’s family was as important as killing the man himself. Part of any victory was to inflict the maximum amount of suffering and humiliation on the other side.

  “The savage wars of peace”—Rudyard Kipling’s phrase from his jingoistic poem “The White Man’s Burden,” the literary battle cry of racial imperialism—could only end in the extermination of one race or the other. Hence the centrality of attacks on women and children: the object was to destroy the enemy through the murder of his family or to corrupt his seed through captivity and rape.

  Texans used the term “depredations” to describe Comanche atrocities. In the Texan view, this was not warfare as practiced by civilized men but rather a form of depraved, predatory attack by wild beasts. The only possible solution was to cage or kill the perpetrators.

  Comanches were not the only targets. Lamar and the hard-liners saw the more peaceful, domesticated tribes of East Texas as equally culpable. When the Cherokees resisted the government’s order that they “voluntarily” remove themselves from their farms and villages, Lamar’s troops conducted a two-day campaign of slaughter and pillage in the summer of 1839, driving out the Indians and torching their homes and fields. The Cherokee defenders, outnumbered three to one, put up tough resistance, but the Texans killed eighteen and wounded one hundred. The elderly Cherokee leader, Chief Bowles, an old friend of Sam Houston’s, greeted the invaders dressed in a brightly colored coat and hat and special cane that Houston had given him. The chief refused to abandon his village, was wounded by the Texans in the attack, and sat down in front of a cooking fire. A Texan put a pistol up against the old man’s ear and blew out his brains. The Texans left the body to rot in the open, where twenty years later the bones were still bleaching in the sun.

  The troops proceeded to blaze a trail of destruction throughout the region, burning out villages of Cherokees, Delawares, Shawnees, Caddos, Kickapoos, Creeks, and Seminoles. The Indians fled north across the Red River into what is now Oklahoma; white settlers quickly took their place. Revisionist historians have characterized these campaigns as exercises in ethnic cleansing. Despite the emotionally charged context, it’s a hard label to refute.

  IN THE VICIOUS STRUGGLE between Texans and Comanches, abductions became the abiding fault line. There was no chance for peaceful coexistence so long as Comanches held white captives, and they never grasped the deep cultural, religious, sexual, and racial hatred that kidnapping Texan women and children aroused. Texans quickly came to see Indians as subhuman in large part because of the seemingly casual cruelty with which they treated captives.

  Still, the ransoms that the Texans paid out for the return of their loved ones served to encourage more abductions. And the Comanches couldn’t help but notice that the more abused the victims looked, the more willing the Texans seemed to be to buy them back.

  By 1840 both sides were exhausted from the conflict and even Governor Lamar entertained the possibility of accommodation. But the return of all white captives was a nonnegotiable precondition for a t
ruce. With this in mind, Texan officials invited Comanche leaders to a peace conference in San Antonio in mid-February and told them they could have a treaty provided they returned all of their white prisoners. As an insurance policy, the Texans quietly arranged to have three companies of infantrymen waiting in the wings.

  This was the moment when two alien civilizations collided. It was if the laws of physics had overcome whatever good intentions might have existed and pushed both sides into disaster.

  Decked out in an exotic array of buckskin breechclouts, red jackets, blue trousers, and great eagle-feather bonnets—the Comanche equivalent of formal wear—a dozen chiefs paraded to the main plaza in San Antonio with fifty of their warriors, women, and children on March 19, 1840. The chiefs sat themselves on the floor of the small Council House in the heart of the plaza, not far from the ruins of the Alamo. They brought with them only one white captive, fifteen-year-old Matilda Lockhart. She had been taken in a raid two years earlier, along with her younger sister. Matilda, in keeping with the Comanche sense of what kind of captive made the most effective impression on white people, was thoroughly disfigured.

  “Her head, arms, and face were full of bruises and sores, and her nose actually burnt off to the bone—all the fleshy end gone, and a great scab formed on the end of the bone,” recalled Mary A. Maverick, one of San Antonio’s first ladies. “She told a piteous tale of how dreadfully the Indians had beaten her, and how they would wake her from sleep by sticking a chunk of fire to her flesh, especially to her nose, and how they would shout and laugh like fiends when she cried. Her body had many scars from before, many of which she showed us. Ah, it was sickening to behold, and made one’s blood boil.”

  Matilda told the Texans that the Indians were holding some fifteen other captives outside of town, hoping to bargain for each one individually. When the angry Texans demanded the return of the other captives, Chief Muguara, leader of the Penataka band, responded that they were safe but that he himself only had custody of Matilda. He said the other captors were expecting blankets, firearms, and booty in exchange for their human prizes. This made perfect sense to him, and he concluded his oration with a simple, innocent question: “How do you like that answer?”

  All of which further enraged the Texans. In a pre-rehearsed maneuver, they summoned the waiting soldiers. One company of troops surrounded the building while another marched inside the room. The Texans decided to hold Muguara and his fellow chiefs until the Comanches produced the other captives. The Texans’ interpreter, himself a former captive, was too terrified at first to convey the threat. When the officials insisted, he delivered their message in Comanche and immediately fled the room. The chiefs, stunned at such a flagrant violation of the sanctity of the peace council, rose to their feet. When a sentinel blocked his path, Muguara pulled a knife and stabbed the guard, after which the eleven other warriors surged forward and tried to fight their way out of the chamber. Soldiers stationed along the walls and at the windows cut loose with a thundering volley of rifle fire, transforming the tight little room into an acrid slaughterhouse reeking of flesh, blood, smoke, and gunpowder. All of the chiefs were killed. Soldiers in the courtyard opened fire on the Comanches outside, killing at least a dozen more, mostly women and children. Seven whites died as well, including a visiting judge who was shot in the heart by an arrow fired by one of the Comanche children.

  The surviving warriors careened down the streets of San Antonio in terror past equally terrified residents. Soldiers followed in hot pursuit. “Here are Indians! Here are Indians!” Mary Maverick screamed to her brother-in-law, who pulled out a gun and shot two of the Comanches. Another Indian tried to grab the reins of Army captain Lysander Wells’s horse. The two men grappled for a grim moment, swaying from side to side, until Wells managed to draw his pistol and shoot the Indian dead at point-blank range.

  All of the sixty-five or so Indians who had ridden into San Antonio, including women and children, were either killed or captured. The Texans released the wife of one of the slain chiefs and sent her to the Comanche encampment with the message that the Texans would free the other prisoners when the Indians returned their remaining white captives. But when the woman reached the camp and described what had happened, the Comanches went into frenzied mourning, weeping and cutting themselves with knives. Then they turned their attention to their captives. With remorseless precision, they staked out and slowly butchered thirteen people, sparing only two young children who had been adopted into the tribe.

  Stunned by the killing of their most cherished elders, the Comanches fled north. But after a period of mourning, they plotted their revenge. Under the leadership of Buffalo Hump, the last surviving Penateka chief, an invading army of some four hundred warriors and their families managed to slip undetected into the region in August. They struck first at Victoria, a small farming town at the bottom of the Guadalupe valley, killing a half dozen farmers and field hands and laying siege to the village. The settlers held them off overnight and the next day the raiders swerved east. In each town along the way they surprised inhabitants who had never anticipated such a brazen attack. In one, they seized a woman named Nancy Crosby, said to be the granddaughter of the great frontiersman Daniel Boone, killed her baby, and hauled her off on horseback. Eventually they reached the port town of Linnville. Most of the residents managed to reach the village dock and fled on boats into the Gulf of Mexico. They watched from offshore as the raiders sacked the town, pillaged shops and warehouses, and set them ablaze. The Indians rounded up cattle and slaughtered them, tied feather beds and bolts of fabric to horses, and dragged them around the streets. John J. Linn, a merchant and town father, recorded in a memoir how the warriors pulled from his warehouse several cases of hats and umbrellas belonging to James Robinson, a San Antonio merchant. “These the Indians made free with, and went dashing about the blazing village, amid their screeching squaws and ‘little Injuns,’ like demons in a drunken saturnalia, with Robinson’s hats on their heads and Robinson’s umbrellas bobbing about on every side like tipsy young balloons,” he wrote.

  Finally, the Comanches pulled out of the town, hauling their plunder on pack mules. Swathed in stolen clothing, men’s and women’s, the raiders herded some three thousand horses and perhaps a dozen captives. Twenty-three settlers had been killed, including eight black slaves and servants. Among the dead was Mrs. Crosby, speared through the heart. But the vast array of booty slowed down the retreating raiding party, as did the women and children who trailed behind. A combined force of citizen volunteers and Texas Rangers caught up to the Indians at Plum Creek, in the vicinity of the present-day Lockhart, and dealt them a major defeat. At least fifty warriors were killed and the surviving Indians abandoned most of their plunder and ran.

  After Plum Creek, Lamar dispatched Colonel John Moore and a column of men to Comancheria to wreak their own special vengeance. They rode up the Colorado River toward the edge of the Staked Plains until they came across a Comanche camp of some sixty lodges. Moore had his men stampede the Indians’ horses so that they had no escape. Then he positioned a group of riflemen overlooking the river’s edge. When he finally attacked the camp, the warriors fled into the water and the riflemen opened fire. They shot at everything that moved and kept shooting until nothing did—resulting in a death toll of perhaps 130 Comanches. “The bodies of men, women, and children were to be seen on every hand, wounded, dying and dead,” Moore reported back to Austin, betraying no hint of shame.

  The Council House Massacre, the subsequent Comanche invasion of white settlements, and the aftermath marked the last time Comanches and Texans fought as armies on somewhat even terms. What’s important to note is that the flashpoint here, as in so many of the spasms of violence that followed, was captives.

  FOLLOWING THE LINNVILLE RAID, most Comanches retreated into the forbidding upper reaches of Comancheria. But other non-Comanche tribes saw advantages in cutting deals with the Texans. In May 1842, General Zachary Taylor, the new commander of Fort Gi
bson in the eastern sector of Indian Territory, held a peace conference with various tribes and urged them to bring in their captives. Three months later a party of Kickapoo Indians returned with James Pratt Plummer, now seven years old, whom they said they had purchased from the Comanches for $400. About a month later a Delaware Indian brought in thirteen-year-old John Parker. The two cousins, both of whom spoke only Comanche, exulted in each other’s company.

  James Parker first heard rumors of the boys’ release, and then saw a newspaper report. He started out for Fort Gibson three days before Christmas, arriving three weeks later. After seven years with the Comanches, both boys had been thoroughly Indianized, although James claimed that the backs of both of them were covered with scars, “evidence … of the free exercise of savage barbarity.” James was stunned by his red-haired grandson’s resemblance to his late daughter Rachel. James Pratt, “learning that I had come after him, ran off, and went to the Dragoon encampment, about one mile from the garrison,” James wrote. “Poor child, how my heart bled, when he thus avoided me … [H]e was incapable of appreciating my kind intentions toward him.”

  It took two hours of painful conversation through an interpreter for James to explain to his grandson how they were related. James Pratt asked if he had a mother. “I told him he had not, as she had died,” James recalled. “He then asked if he had a father. I told him he had …”

  James Pratt Plummer agreed to accompany his grandfather back to Texas.

  But James Parker, showing again his trademark egotism, turned what should have been a joyous reunion into a vituperative family feud. He refused to turn over James Pratt to the boy’s father, Luther Plummer, claiming Plummer owed him repayment of ransom money and a share of his expenses for his many journeys to Indian Territory. When Plummer wrote to Sam Houston to complain, the Texas president replied with a stinging condemnation. For all his own problems with James, Houston wrote, he never suspected James would behave in such an ugly fashion. “It evinces a degree of heartlessness totally incompatible with the common feelings of humanity,” Houston told Plummer in an April 1843 letter. Houston committed the government of Texas to cover the entire cost of the ransom. “You will, therefore, take your child home,” Houston wrote. “Mr. Parker has not the shadow of right to detain him, and by so doing is not only laying himself under the imputation of extreme brutality, but is subjecting himself to the penalties of law.”