Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (8 page)

In the late 1600s, Comanche mastery of the horse had led them to migrate southward out of the harsh, cold lands of the Wind River and into more temperate climates. The meaning of the migration was simple: They were challenging other tribes for supremacy over the single richest hunting prize on the continent: the buffalo herds of the southern plains.

In 1706 they rode, for the first time, into recorded history. In July of that year a Spanish sergeant major named Juan De Ulibarri, on his way to gather Pueblo Indians for conversion in northern New Mexico, reported that Comanches, in the company of Utes, were preparing to attack Taos pueblo.
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He later heard of actual Comanche attacks.
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This was the first the Spanish or any white men had heard of these Indians who had many names. One name in particular, given to them by the Utes, was Koh-mats, sometimes given as Komantcia, and
meant “anyone who is against me all the time.” The authorities in New Mexico translated this various ways (Cumanche, Commanche) but eventually as “Comanche.”
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It would take the Spaniards years to figure out exactly who these new invaders were.

HIGH LONESOME

With these remarks, I submit the following pages to the perusal of a generous public, feeling assured that before they are published, the hand that penned them will be cold in death.
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Those are the words of twenty-year-old Rachel Parker Plummer, written probably sometime in early 1839. She was referring to her memoir of captivity, and predicting her own death. She was right. She died on March 19 of that year. She had been dragged, sometimes quite literally, over half of the Great Plains as the abject slave of Comanche Indians, and then had logged another two thousand miles in what amounted to one of the most grueling escapes ever made from any tribe by any captive. To the readers of her era, the memoir was jaw-dropping. It still is. As a record of pure, blood-tinged, white-knuckled adventure on America’s nineteenth-century frontier, there are few documents that can compare to it.

On the morning after that harrowing first night, the five Parker captives—Rachel and her fourteen-month-old son, James, her aunt Elizabeth Kellogg (probably in her thirties), nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker, and her seven-year-old brother, John, were strapped to horses behind Comanche riders again and taken north. For the next five days the Comanches pressed hard, passing Cross Timbers, the forty-mile-wide patch of woods on the otherwise open prairie west of modern Dallas, “a beautiful faced country,” as Rachel put it, with “a great many fine springs.” Not that she was allowed to drink from them. During that time, the Indians gave their captives no food at all, and
only a single small allowance of water. Each night they were tied tightly with leather thongs that made their wrists and ankles bleed; as before, their hands and feet were drawn together and they were put facedown on the ground.

Rachel does not tell us much about what happened to Cynthia Ann—beyond the blows, the blood, and the trussing of the first night—but it is possible to make an educated guess about what happened to her. Though Comanches were mercurial about these things, their treatment of a nine-year-old girl would usually have been different from that accorded the adult women. Cynthia Ann’s first few days and nights were no doubt horrific. There was the shrieking panic of the Indian attack, the uncomprehending horror of the moment her mother, Lucy, set her on the warrior’s horse, her own father’s bloody death, the astonishing sight of her cousin and aunt being raped and abused. (In spite of her strict Baptist upbringing, as a farm girl she would have known about sex and reproduction; still, it would have shed little light on what she witnessed.) There was the hard ride through the prairie darkness of northern Texas to the camp where she was tied and bludgeoned, then the five subsequent days on the trail without food.

Considering what happened to her later, however, it is likely that the beatings and harsh treatment stopped. There are plenty of records of children being killed by Comanches, and of young girls being raped, but in general they fared far better than the adults. For one thing, they were young enough to be assimilated into a society that had abysmally low fertility rates (partly caused by the life on horseback, which induced miscarriages early in pregnancy) and needed captives to keep their numbers up.
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They were also valuable for the ransom they might bring. In several other unusually violent Comanche raids, young female captives had been conspicuously spared and quickly accepted into the tribe. Girls had a decent chance, anyway. Certainly that was true compared to adult male captives, who were automatically killed or tortured to death. The strongest argument for her humane treatment was the presence at the Parker raid of the man who would later become her husband and a war chief: Peta Nocona. Indeed, Peta may well have led the raid, and it may have been his horse upon which Lucy Parker had put the screaming, protesting Cynthia Ann.
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On the sixth day the Indians divided their captives: Elizabeth Kellogg was traded or given to a band of Kichai Indians, a sedentary tribe from north-central Texas that raised crops and enjoyed something like vassal status with the Comanches; Cynthia Ann and John went to a band of middle Coman
ches, probably the Nokonis; Rachel and James went to another Comanche band. She had assumed that they would let her son, bruised and bloody but somehow still alive, stay with her. She was wrong. “As soon as they found out I had weaned him,” she wrote, “they, in spite of all my efforts, tore him from my embrace. He reached out his hands toward me, which were covered with blood, and cried, “‘Mother, Mother, oh, Mother!’ I looked after him as he was borne from me, and I sobbed aloud. This was the last I ever heard of my little Pratt.”
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Rachel’s band pushed on to the cooler elevations in the north, probably into what is now eastern Colorado. She found herself on the high, barren plains. “We now lost sight of timber,” Rachel wrote. “We would travel for weeks and not see a riding switch. Buffalo dung is all the fuel. This is gathered into a round pile; and when set on fire it does very well to cook by, and will keep fire for several days.”
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They were in the heart of Comancheria, an utterly alien place that was known to mapmakers of the time as the Great American Desert. To anyone accustomed to timbered lands, which describes almost everyone in America prior to 1840, the plains were not just unlike anything they had ever seen, they were, on some fundamental level, incomprehensible, as though a person who had lived in the high mountains all his life were seeing the ocean for the first time. “East of the Mississippi civilization stood on three legs—land, water, and timber,” wrote Walter Prescott Webb in his classic
The Great Plains.
“West of the Mississippi not one but two of those legs were withdrawn—water and timber—and civilization was left on one leg—land. It is a small wonder that it toppled over in temporary failure.”
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If there existed an implacably hostile human barrier to Spanish, French, and American advance in the form of the Plains Indians, there also existed an actual, physical barrier. For people living in the twenty-first century this is hard to imagine, because the land today is not as it was in the nineteenth century. Almost all of the American landscape has now been either farmed, ranched, logged, or developed in some way, and in many parts of the country the raw distinctions between forest and prairie have been lost. But in its primeval state, almost all of North America, from the eastern coast to the 98th meridian—a line of longitude that runs north to south roughly through the modern cities of San Antonio, Oklahoma City, and Wichita—was densely timbered, and the contrast between the dense eastern woodlands and the “big sky” country of the west would have been stark. A traveler going west would have seen nothing like open prairie until he hit the 98th meridian,
whereupon, in many places, he would have been literally staring out of a dark, Grimm Brothers forest at a treeless plain. It would have seemed to him a vast emptiness. At that point, everything the pioneer woodsman knew about how to survive—including building houses, making fire, and drawing water—broke down. It was why the plains were the very last part of the country to be settled.

The main reason was rainfall. Or lack of it. Just west of the 98th, the annual rainfall dropped below twenty inches; when that happens trees find it hard to survive; rivers and streams become sparse. The ecology of the plains was, moreover, one of fire—constant lightning- or Indian-induced conflagrations that cut enormous swaths through the plains and killed most saplings that did not live in river or stream bottoms. A traveler coming out of humid, swampy, rain-drenched, pine-forested, river-crossed Louisiana would have hit the first prairie somewhere south of present-day Dallas, not very far from Parker’s Fort. Indeed, one of the reasons Parker’s Fort marked the limit of settlement in 1836 was that it was very near the edge of the Great Plains. That land consisted of rolling, creased plains dotted with timber; there was thicker timber in the bottoms of the Navasota River. (From the Parkers’ point of view this was quite deliberate; they built a stockade fort, after all, of cedar.) But a hundred miles west there would have been no timber at all, and by the time the traveler reached modern-day Lubbock and Amarillo, he would have seen nothing but a dead flat and infinitely receding expanse of grama and buffalo grasses through which only a few gypsum-laced rivers ran and on which few landmarks if any would have been distinguishable. Travelers of the day described it as “oceanic,” which was not a term of beauty. They found it empty and terrifying. They also described it as “trackless,” which was literally true: All traces of a wagon train rolling through plains grass would disappear in a matter of days, vanishing like beach footprints on an incoming tide.

Not only were the High Plains generally without timber and water, they were also subject to one of the least hospitable climates in North America. In the summer came brutal heat and blowtorch winds, often a hundred degrees or hotter, that would later destroy whole crops in a matter of days. The winds caused the eyes to burn, the lips to crack, and the body to dehydrate with alarming speed. In fall and winter there was the frequent “norther”—a sudden strong wind from the north, often at gale force, accompanied by a solid sheet of black clouds and enormous billowing clouds of blown sand. A norther could send the temperature plunging by fifty degrees in an hour. A “blue”
norther had the additional feature of freezing, driven rain. This was routine weather on the plains.

Worst of all was the blizzard. People from the east or west coasts of America may think they have seen a blizzard. Likely they have not. It is almost exclusively a phenomenon of the plains, and got its name on the plains. It entailed wind-driven snow so dense and temperatures so cold that anyone lost in them on the shelterless plains was as good as dead. In the years after the plains were settled it was not unusual for people to become lost and die while walking from their barns to their houses. Howling winds blew for days. Forty- to fifty-foot snowdrifts were common, as were “whiteouts” where it no longer became possible to tell the ground from the air. Plains blizzards swallowed whole army units, settlements, and Indian villages. This, too, was Comancheria, the beautiful and unremittingly hostile place they had chosen, the southernmost and richest range of the American buffalo. This was the very last part of the continent conquered and held by the U.S. Army. The last part anyone wanted, the last part civilized. The land alone stood a good chance of killing you. The fact that it was inhabited by Comanches and other mounted Indians made death something of a certainty.

This is where Rachel Plummer was now, very likely five hundred miles beyond the nearest settlement, in a place where only a few white men had ever been. From a settler’s viewpoint, this was just empty territory, part of the United States by dint of the Louisiana Purchase (1803) but without forts or soldiers or even human beings beyond the odd trapper or explorer or occasional mule train along the nearby Santa Fe Trail. The first caravans would not roll across the Oregon Trail for four years. This was Indian land; lived on by Indians, hunted by Indians, and fought over by Indians. In Rachel’s account, she spent much of her thirteen months of captivity on the high plains, though she also describes a journey through the Rocky Mountains, where “I suffered more from cold than I ever suffered in my life before. It was very seldom I had anything to put on my feet, but very little covering for my body.”
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