The Searchers (13 page)

Ross himself was happy to feed the myth. “
The fruits of this important victory
can never be computed in dollars and cents,” he wrote in a letter after he became governor that sounds ghostwritten by the bombastic Victor Rose. “The great Comanche Confederacy was forever broken, the blow was decisive; their illustrious chief slept with his fathers and with him were most of his doughty warriors.”

All of which was pure fantasy. The Comanche nation was as yet far from broken. The war between Texans and Comanches would continue for another fifteen years.

The Pease River massacre, although celebrated as a great Ranger triumph over a superior force of Comanche warriors, was in truth just another revenge raid. The Comanches had killed five white women in northeastern Texas; in return, the troopers and Rangers killed at least four Comanche women. And, like the Comanches, the Rangers took scalps to verify the body count. In the merciless logic of the conflict, they had evened the score. As for Cynthia Ann Parker, a woman who twenty-four years earlier had been the victim of a massacre by one side had now been victimized again, only this time by the side that considered her one of their own.

Slowed by the bitter cold and their human cargo, Sergeant John Spangler and his troops, accompanied by Sul Ross and his Rangers, took ten days to deliver the captured white woman and her baby girl to Camp Cooper, one of the chain of frontier forts that formed the uneasy perimeter between the settlers and the Indians of North Texas. Despite their efforts to put her at ease, Cynthia Ann said little and ate nothing but the dried buffalo meat she carried with her. Coming to a half-frozen creek one day, Cynthia Ann's pony broke the ice with his front hoof. As she leaned over to drink some of the cold water with her hand, she lost hold of the little girl, who plunged into the stream. Cynthia Ann caught the child instantly, swooping her up and wrapping her in a shawl, then tucking her inside the vast smelly buffalo robe. Ross noted the speed and efficiency of a determined mother. He also noted that
the child never cried
.

Spangler had formal custody of the prisoners. When they arrived at Camp Cooper, he turned them over to his commander, Captain N. G. Evans.

Situated on the Clear Fork of the Brazos, Camp Cooper was a forlorn collection of thirteen small cabins and huts, most of them in an advanced state of disrepair. The damp cold penetrated the walls, floors, and ceilings of the six stone buildings, two mud huts, three picket-style sheds—wooden posts hammered directly into the ground with no frame or foundation—and two tarpaulins stretched over frames. Any attempt at repairs, an inspector had written the previous year, “
would be a waste of the materials
out of which they would be made.”

Spangler and his men arrived soon after Christmas. The captives
were taken to the stone guardhouse. Evans sought to question Cynthia Ann through an interpreter named Horace Jones. She told Jones she had lived among the Comanches for many years and said she had two sons who were still with them. It was unclear to Evans whether the woman was to be treated as a liberated captive or as a prisoner. “I have now the woman in the guard house and will await instructions from the department Commander as to her disposition,” he wrote to his immediate superior at U.S. Army headquarters in San Antonio.

Evans turned the woman over to a fellow officer, Captain Innis Palmer, whose wife took charge of her. To the wives at the fort
she looked and smelled like a savage
, and so, despite her spirited objections, they stripped her of her Comanche garments, which they burned. Then they bathed and scrubbed her and dressed her in a secondhand pioneer outfit. It was the first time she had worn clothing with buttons in twenty-five years.

“They found enough clothes to clothe her, had an old Negro mammy prepare some hot water and wash her thoroughly, combed her hair and let her look at herself in a mirror,” recalled Gholson. At first she seemed satisfied, but suddenly she dashed out the door. “
It was a race
such as I have never seen before or since,” claimed Gholson. “In the lead was the squaw, jerking off clothes as she ran until she soon had on almost nothing; behind came the Negro mammy frantically waving a cloth or something, two or three bewildered white women … and the squaw's little child, big enough to toddle around, following after.”

Palmer asked Horace Jones to take the woman to his family quarters and look after her with his wife until she was identified and restored to her relatives. Jones refused. He told Palmer that as far as he was concerned,
she was a wild Indian
and would be constantly attempting to escape “and in all probability succeeding by stealing my horses.”

Isaac Parker, older brother of Cynthia Ann's late father, Silas, received Ross's letter and read newspaper accounts suggesting the white woman captive might be his long-lost niece. Isaac was sixty-seven years old that winter, a gray-haired man with the thick white beard and stern countenance of a biblical elder. He had served in the Texas National Congress during most of its nine years of independence, and then as a senator in the state legislature for seven more.
Over the years he had honored the memory
of his murdered father and brothers by pushing through bills calling for greater protection for the frontier settlements, establishing payment and equipment for Ranger and volunteer groups, and demanding the return of all white captives. He was also a loyal supporter
of Sam Houston, whom he had known for more than forty years. Like his older brother Daniel, Isaac had served as a middleman and conciliator between their hotheaded brother James and Houston, helping sponsor both James's aggressive forays into Indian Territory and Houston's peace policy. Isaac raised four children of his own with his wife, Lucy, on a farm near Birdville, a village some ten miles northeast of Fort Worth. He was known for his generosity and his keen commitment to his family. When state lawmakers created a new county west of Fort Worth in 1855, they named it in his honor.

By 1860 Isaac was the only Parker of his generation still capable of undertaking the journey to determine whether the captive woman at Camp Cooper was Cynthia Ann. Lucy Duty Parker, Cynthia Ann's mother, had died in 1852 without knowing her oldest child's fate. Uncle James, who had devoted most of a decade to an obsessive search for the abducted children, was sixty-three years old and in ill health, remarried after the death of his first wife, Martha, and living three hundred miles to the southeast in Houston County. And so Isaac Parker set off by himself in a two-horse buggy for Camp Cooper. He rode forty-five miles west to the frontier town of Weatherford, where he obtained a letter of introduction from John Baylor, the former Indian agent who was editor of the
White Man
, and some clothing for Cynthia Ann, from his niece Nancy Parker. “
Make them plenty big, Nancy
,” he told her. “The Parker people are big people.” Then he and a neighbor of Nancy's rode another ninety miles to Camp Cooper, arriving in mid-January. Isaac met first with Evans and Jones and then was taken to see the prisoner.

Isaac Parker, Cynthia Ann's uncle, who traveled to Fort Cooper in January 1861 to claim her and her daughter and return them to her Texas family.

Isaac Parker's cabin near Birdville, Texas, outside Fort Worth, where Cynthia Ann and her daughter, Prairie Flower, lived in 1861 after she was returned to her Texas family. The photo was taken in 1925 before the cabin was dismantled and relocated to the Amon Carter Ranch. It has since been moved again to the Log Cabin Village in Fort Worth.

She was stout and powerfully built. Her hair was dark and stringy, her skin callused. Her expression was edgy, like a deer caught in the harsh glare of a soldier's torch. Isaac asked a series of questions designed to test her memories of her childhood.

“She sat for a time immovable, lost in profound meditation, oblivious to every thing by which she was surrounded, ever and anon convulsed as it were by some powerful emotion which she struggled to suppress,” stated one newspaper report of the meeting. “
After the lapse of a few moments
, she was enabled in her beautiful language of intelligible signs and Comanche tongue, with a peculiarly sweet English accent, to give the following narrative.” She claimed to remember the fence around Old Fort Parker, drinking milk fresh from the stockade's cows, the Indians raiders carrying the white flag, and the ensuing slaughter.

“When Col. Parker requested the interpreter to ask her if she recollected
her name,” wrote one reporter, “she arose before the question could be asked by him, and striking herself on the breast exclaimed, ‘
Me Cynthia Ann
.' “

THE WITNESS ACCOUNTS of her first meeting with Uncle Isaac portray Cynthia Ann as an indoctrinated savage desperately trying to break through the psychic chains of her long captivity to return to her natural civilized state. In the eyes of white observers it was as if the Comanches had stolen her soul, which she now struggled to reclaim. The ties that bound her emotionally and culturally to her Comanche family and to the wider Comanche world were invisible to them and made no sense. They knew neither psychology nor anthropology and possessed no intellectual or scientific tools to help them understand who she was, what she had become, or what she wanted. Most of all, they could not see that—despite her baptism and her early Christian upbringing—she was for all intents and purposes a Comanche, violently thrust, like a kidnapped time traveler, from one world into another.

Isaac sought to embrace her, but she began to weep. She said she did not wish to go home with him; she wanted either to stay at Fort Cooper until she got some word about her two sons, Quanah and Pecos, or else to return to her people—meaning, of course, the Comanches. But Isaac gave her no choice. First, however,
she pleaded with Horace Jones
to keep watch for her boys. If they were captured, she begged him, please protect them from harm and send them to her.

All the goods captured by individual Rangers and cavalrymen at the Pease River had been sold off, and Isaac had to buy back Cynthia Ann's pony and saddle for the long ride to Birdville. It took them several days to make the gray winter journey. Each night, when they would camp, the toddler would gather sticks and anything else she could find to put on the fire. “She was the smartest child of her age I ever saw,” recalled Isaac's son, I. D. Parker.
They finally arrived in Birdville
on January 26.

The modest log ranch house built by Isaac in the late 1840s consisted of two separate cabins connected by a breezeway. For Cynthia Ann, who was used to sleeping under the stars or in a teepee, the crowded little room in which she was confined at night must have felt like a prison cell. The unfamiliar white women's clothing, the strange food, and the stares of outsiders could only have added to the sense that she had fallen into enemy hands. To her relatives, she seemed like an exotic wild animal, and they viewed her with pity, fascination, and revulsion.
She had grown up among the heathens, had become one herself, had even had intercourse with one, and had given birth to three little savages. She had brazenly crossed a forbidden boundary.

Rather than concede the reality that she preferred her Indian family to her white relatives, newspaper stories claimed she had been whipped and tortured into compliance by the Comanches. Her arms and body “bear the marks of having been cruelly treated,” reported the
Clarksville Northern Standard
. Her supposed torments were given sexual context.
Her “long night of suffering
and woe could furnish the material for a tale more interesting than those found in the Arabian Nights Entertainment,” opined the
Dallas Herald
.

She quickly became a local attraction. “When they got here and the news spread, the
people came from near and far
for a week or more,” recalled I. D. Parker. “When she would see a crowd coming she would run to my wife and cling to her and sometimes crawl under the bed as she believed she would be killed.”