Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (34 page)

She was not dressed in Indian costume but wore a torn calico dress. Her hair was bronzed by the sun. Her face was tanned, and she made a pathetic figure as she stood there, viewing the crowds that swarmed about her. The tears were streaming down her face, and she was muttering in the Indian language.
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Texans could not get enough of her. There were many newspaper accounts of her return, all of which were uniformly obsessed with the idea that a pretty little nine-year-old white girl from a devout Baptist family had been transformed into a pagan savage who had mated with a redskin and borne his children and forgotten her mother tongue. She was thus, according to the morals of the day, grotesquely compromised. She had forsaken the virtues of Christianity for the wanton immorality of the Indian. That was the attraction. And all the stories assumed that everything she had done had been forced upon her. That she had suffered grievous mistreatment, had been whipped and beaten and had led a lonely and desperate existence. People simply did not believe that a Christian white woman had gone along with it voluntarily. One paper, the
Clarksville Northern Standard,
observed later that “her body and arms bear the marks of having been cruelly treated.”
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Yet there is nothing to suggest that she was cruelly treated after the first few days
of her captivity, as her cousin Rachel Plummer had described them. She was the ward of a chief, later his wife. The scars may have resulted from the practice among Comanche women of cutting themselves in mourning, often on the arms and breasts. Apparently no white people wanted to think too hard about the implications of the lovely mixed-race girl named Prairie Flower, whom her mother obviously adored.

After the carnival interlude in town, the party continued to Birdville. Here Isaac lived in a spacious “double log” cabin that was considered for many years the finest house in Tarrant County. It is not clear exactly what he thought he was going to accomplish with Cynthia Ann and her daughter. Perhaps he was simply doing what he considered to be his family duty. Perhaps he saw himself as her deliverer, imagining the day when Cynthia Ann, grateful and weeping, would embrace Jesus and forsake her savage ways.

Nothing of the sort happened. Cynthia Ann’s repatriation was in fact a disaster. She was not only unrepentant. She was actively, and incessantly, hostile to her captors. She tried repeatedly to escape with her daughter, sometimes making it far into the woods and requiring a search party to find her. She was so intent on leaving that Isaac had to lock her in the house when he was away. As her legal guardian, he was empowered to do so. Cynthia Ann was being treated as though she were crazy: An entirely “free” white woman, thirty-three years old and from a prominent family, was being forcibly restrained so that she could not return to her sons and the culture that raised her. Her family believed that, owing to a life in which they assumed she had been sexually abused and beaten and enslaved, she was unable to know what was best for her. Cynthia Ann, meanwhile, always had a clear and quite correct sense of her own interests. Such treatment must have been terrible to endure.

She could not, or would not, speak English, though in any case what she remembered would have been rudimentary. She would sit for hours and hours on the wide porch of Isaac’s house weeping and nursing Prairie Flower. She refused to stop her pagan devotions. One of her relatives described her ritual of worship:

She went out to a smooth place on the ground, cleaned it off very nicely and made a circle and a cross. On the cross she built a fire, burned some tobacco, and then cut a place on her breast and let the blood drop onto the fire. She then lit her pipe and blowed smoke toward the sun and assumed an attitude of the most sincere devotion. She afterwards said through an interpreter that this was her prayer to her great spirit to enable her to understand and appreciate that these were her relatives and kindred she was among.
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The family and neighbors retaliated by demanding that Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower give up wearing Indian clothing and insisting that Prairie Flower be given instruction in Scripture.
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Cynthia Ann was uncooperative. Things did not go well.

In late January 1861, a little more than a month after the Pease River fight, Isaac Parker took his charges to Austin to try to convince the Texas legislature to give them a pension—a sort of compensation for the hardships they had endured. This was a clever idea, but would require a good deal of political grease, and he was exactly the sort of man who could pull it off. As a lifelong politician and elected official, Isaac knew everyone in the capital. He and Sam Houston, then governor of Texas, were old friends. They had fought together in the War of 1812. Later, Houston had sent Isaac as an emissary to Washington to gather support for the Texas revolution.

The Parkers arrived in Austin on a chilly January day to find the city firmly in the grip of secession fever. Abraham Lincoln had been elected president the previous fall, and anti-Union sentiment in Texas was in full cry. Austin was its center. Throughout the month of January secessionists marched up and down the rutted dirt of Congress Avenue, the city’s broad main street that was newly lined with sturdy limestone buildings. It climbed gently from the Colorado River toward the imposing new three-story domed state capitol, which was fronted by marble Ionic columns and a huge portico. The secessionists were in their glory. They were an unruly bunch, carrying torches and signs that condemned Lincoln and his “abolitionist” government. They held parades and marches on a moment’s notice. One featured a loud brass band, a long line of carriages containing ladies who fluttered Texas flags, and a boisterous contingent of men on horseback, all led by Ranger Rip Ford, who pranced down the avenue on a white stallion.
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Texas flags flew everywhere, and there was even talk of a second republic. The air was cold and bracing, and Texans were in a high mood.

The secession convention, which began on January 28, featured an Olympian fight between Governor Houston, who opposed breaking away from the United States, and almost everyone else, who favored it. The old statesman delivered one of the greatest speeches of his career, pleading that “it is not unmanly to pause and at least endeavor to avert the calamity.” People listened respectfully to him. And then voted 171–6 in favor of secession.
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That took place on February 1, 1861. On April 12, Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, signaling the start of the Civil War.

Into one of these volatile debates came Cynthia Ann Parker, cleaned up
and dressed nicely by two prominent Austin women who had taken a special interest in her. They were showing her the splendors of the white man’s world. She entered through the massive portico and climbed the stone steps to the gallery on the second floor where she sat and listened to men debate an issue she could not possibly have comprehended in a language she did not remember. Still, she became visibly agitated. She took up her daughter and ran for the door. After she was tackled and brought back—she was always being tackled and brought back in those days—it occurred to her companions that she believed the men on the floor of the legislature were sitting in judgment of her. She thought they were deciding whether or not to put her to death.
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Here, too, Cynthia Ann and her daughter were objects of great curiosity. She was “visited by very many,” reported one newspaper, which meant that crowds of people came and stared at her. She was visibly distraught. She spoke sparely and only through an interpreter. At one point she stated that she was surprised to discover that the Comanches were not, as she had supposed, the “most numerous and powerful people in the world.”
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Or at least that is what one newspaper reporter heard. While in Austin she sat for a “tintype”—an early type of photograph. The resulting image shows a woman who has clearly been gussied up, though she looks deeply uncomfortable in her new clothes. Her hair is pulled back in what looks like some sort of net. She wears a patterned cotton blouse and a striped skirt and what looks to be a woolen robe clasped at the neck. Her unusually large and work-scarred hands are crossed on her lap. Her gaze is direct, supplicating, and utterly miserable.
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Her misery notwithstanding, Isaac’s plan worked. Two months after their visit, the Texas legislature voted to grant Cynthia Ann a $100-a-year pension for five years, plus a league of land (4,428 acres). Here, too, she was treated as a special case. The money and land were not to come to her but to be held in trust for her by her cousins Isaac Duke Parker and Benjamin Parker, as though they were the guardians of a minor—or of a mentally infirm adult who was unable to speak for herself.
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Back in Birdville, Cynthia Ann continued to be disconsolate living at her uncle Silas’s house. She wept; she tried to escape; she refused to cooperate. Nothing changed. And so, in the hope that she might find greater happiness elsewhere and perhaps also to get her out of Isaac’s hair, she began a long and strange odyssey through the homes of various relatives that had the ultimate effect of taking her deeper and deeper into east Texas, farther and
farther from the Great Plains, and thus from any hope that she could ever be reunited with her people.

The first stop on this journey was the oddest of all. Hearing of her unhappiness with Isaac, Cynthia Ann’s cousin William Parker and his wife, who lived two miles south of Isaac, had volunteered to take her in. His generosity seemed innocent enough. But William, as it turned out, was not acting out of charity. He had a very specific and entirely self-serving reason for inviting Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower to his home.

Shortly after Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower moved, cousin William sent a letter to a Texan named Coho Smith. Coho’s real name was John Jeremiah Smith. His nickname came as the result of being wounded by a lance.
Cojo
in Spanish means “lame.” He was one of those marginal, colorful characters who inhabited the Texas frontier in its early days. He recorded his adventures in a book of his own drawings and observations he dubbed his “Cohographs.” He was self-educated and fluent in a number of languages, including Comanche. As a boy, he had spent a year as a Comanche captive. At the time he received Parker’s letter, sometime in late 1861, he was working as a Confederate cotton agent, though he had also worked as a teacher and cabinetmaker. In the letter Parker explained that Cynthia Ann had come to live with him and begged Smith to come to his house—a distance of 189 miles—to act as translator. He said that he and his wife were anxious to have a conversation with their new guest, who could not speak English. For whatever reason, Smith agreed and soon arrived at the Parker place. When he asked where Cynthia Ann was, Parker replied, “I saw her go out the gate about half an hour ago. Let us go and hunt her up. She is generally moping around here in these woods.”
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They found her a hundred yards from the house, sitting on a log with “her elbows on her knees and her hands to her face.” She wore an old sun bonnet. Prairie Flower was playing on the ground. She had constructed a small corral of sticks and was talking to herself in Comanche. William indicated to his cousin that dinner was ready by putting his hand in his mouth. Cynthia Ann shot a sharp, disapproving glance at Smith, then began to follow them back to the house. His wife explained to Smith that “so many people came to see her that it annoyed her. That is why she looked at you so spitefully.” She was still a figure of curiosity, still being gawked at.

Back at the house, Smith spoke to her in Comanche. “Ee-wunee keem,” he said, which meant “come here.” According to Smith, her reaction was immediate and almost violent. “She sprang with a scream and knocked about half the dishes off the table, scaring Mr. Parker. . . . She ran around to me and fell on the floor and caught me around both ankles, crying in Comanche ‘Ee-ma mi mearo,’ meaning ‘I am going with you.’ ”

Now she came fully alive. Sitting on a chair next to Smith, she held him by one arm “talking all the time to me in Comanche and Spanish, mixing the two languages all the time.” Her Spanish was surprisingly good. She would not eat, but kept talking instead. “Oh, don’t eat,” she said in Comanche. “Let us talk. Oh my friend, do let us talk.”

Then she switched to Spanish, and said something that did not make any sense. “I want to go back to my two boys and Billy there has told me by signs that he wants to go to my people also. I said: ‘Billy, do you want to go to the Comanches?’ He said ‘Yes, I do. And that is why I sent for you to interpret, for it is this way.’”

Perplexed, Smith then asked William Parker what she meant. Parker, at length, explained. He told Smith that he had served in the Confederate Army. A union bullet had shattered his thighbone and had partly crippled him. He was not crippled enough, however, to avoid being sent back to the war by the conscription officers he called “dad-blasted heel flies.” The prospect terrified him, as did the notion of being hanged or shot as a deserter. Like thousands of other young men in the Confederate states, Parker had rushed to the recruiting posts in 1861 in anticipation of a brief and glorious war. Now he wanted out. He was desperate.

And he had a plan. “I want you to take me and Cynthia Ann to the Comanches,” he told Smith. “I can stay with them until this cruel war is over.”

The idea was absurd, as though he conceived of the Comanche tribe as a sort of rooming house where he could stay for a few years. Somehow Cynthia Ann had been able to grasp this idea clearly and to comprehend that Smith had been summoned for this reason. The two Parker relatives had obviously found a way to communicate.

Smith, who had no interest in such a venture—for which he, too, could be hanged—offered the weak excuse that there were no horses available. “Horses,” Cynthia Ann exclaimed, “that is nothing! There is some first-rate horses running here . . . don’t hesitate a moment about the horses. Oh, I tell
you, mi Corazon estan llorando todo el tiempo por mis dos hijos. [My heart is crying all the time for my two sons.]” Then, switching back to Comanche, she said: “En-se-ca-sok bu-ku-ne-suwa? [Do you want a heap of horses?]” Then again in Spanish: “No mas lleba mi.” [Only take me.] She offered Smith all the girls or wives he wanted. She offered ten guns, ten horses, ten wives. Cynthia Ann’s harangue, Smith wrote, continued into the early-morning hours.